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May 18, 1999
Web posted at: 4:25 a.m. EDT (0825 GMT)

In this story: Russian immigrant hopes frustrated No-shows RELATED STORIES, SITES

JERUSALEM (CNN) - A journalist who survived the Holocaust sailed into Israel's parliament on a pledge to sap ultra-Orthodox Jews of their political power in one of the biggest surprises of Monday's election.

The acid-tongued Tommy Lapid won six seats for his Shinui (Change) party in the 120-member parliament on his first try, according to unofficial returns with nearly all votes counted.

Lapid, 67, won the hearts of secular Israelis by vowing to stop what he said was the unfair ultra-Orthodox manipulation of parliament to the financial benefit of constituents.

The Haredim, ultra-Orthodox Jews, have for decades traded their support for coalitions in return for cash for their schools and public housing and guarantees of public observance of Jewish law.

A centrist and a lawyer by training, Lapid said he wanted the justice minister's job in prime minister-elect Ehu Barak's new government. Barak ousted Likud party chief Benjamin Netanyahu, who counted the ultra-Orthodox among his partners.

"Barak has enough votes in the center and left to set up a government which does not need the Haredim," Lapid told Israel Army Radio.

Russian immigrant hopes frustrated

Leaders of Israel's main Russian immigrant party on Tuesday tried to put a brave face on an election performance that dashed their hopes of increasing their strength in parliament.

Unofficial final results showed that ex-Soviet dissident 's Yisrael B'Aliya party, which had anticipated winning as many as 10 seats in the 120-seat parliament, had instead remained at seven.

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The showing could dampen the party's hopes of securing the coveted Interior Ministry in a coalition government headed by Labour's centrist leader Ehud Barak, who crushed the incumbent right-wing Likud prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Yisrael Beiteinu, a rival for immigrant votes that was formed for the election by Netanyahu's Russian-born former chief of staff Avigdor Lieberman, won four seats on its debut.

"I want to say to those people who expected 10 mandates, remember what you thought two months ago," Sharansky told a half-full room of activists at party headquarters in Tel Aviv.

Some 800,000 mostly secular immigrants from the former Soviet Union have flooded into Israel over the past decade, creating a powerful voting bloc that represents about 15 percent of the electorate.

In its political debut in the 1996 election, Yisrael B'Aliya won a surprising seven seats.

Sharansky, who served as minister of industry and trade in Netanyahu's government, called on Barak to form a broad-based government with the strength to make tough political decisions on the stalled peace process with the Palestinians.

He said his party had a responsibility to serve as a bridge in what looks likely to be a fractured parliament.

"When I look at the next government I don't see any party in the political map that will be so instrumental in serving as a bridge...That has to be our goal," Sharansky said.

But party activists were less optimistic that the largely secular Yisrael B'Aliya would have the political muscle to wrest the Interior Ministry from the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Shas party, which dramatically increased its strength in parliament.

"You can say the mood is really terrible," said one activist.

The party has been locked in a bitter war of words with Shas over control of the Interior Ministry, which decides who is counted as a Jew, who gets citizenship and what institutions receive state funding.

No-shows

Cosmetics queen and former top model Pnina Rosenblum, 44 and once known as the "Breasts of the Nation," failed to win enough votes to take a seat in parliament with the party she founded in her name.

Voters snuffed out the hopes of a group of avowed pot smokers to become lawmakers.

The Green Leaf party ran on a platform of legalizing marijuana and other so-called "soft-drugs." For its symbol it used a blue-and-white Israeli flag with a green marijuana plant in place of the Star of David.

Reuters contributed to this report.