Aliza Bloch Resigns as YASA President, Signals Return to National Politics

Dr. Aliza Bloch, the former mayor of Beit Shemesh, has resigned as president of the Israel Center for Excellence in Education, YASA, after about two years since leaving city hall. According to N12, she informed the center’s leadership in recent days and is now in advanced talks with several political groupings as she weighs a run in a new social-minded party or an independent bid.

In a farewell letter to YASA’s board, staff and students, Bloch said she was ending a chapter but not stepping away from public life. She wrote that in a country without abundant natural resources, people are the most valuable asset, and argued that children raised in mixed settings, boys and girls, Jews and Arabs, religious and secular, from development towns, kibbutzim and cities, become better leaders with fewer blind spots. She signed off saying she was leaving for a new path and for “a better Israel.”

During her short tenure at YASA, Bloch advanced plans to open branches in Netivot and Kiryat Shmona, a move she said was prompted by meeting a father who had been evacuated from the north. She described the Kiryat Shmona effort as part of the organization’s values, being present where people need help during a difficult period of rebuilding and renewal between rounds of war and evacuation.

Bloch thanked former education minister and YASA board chairman Shay Piron and CEO Adi Blotner. She has previous political experience, including an aborted 2013 run, and made history in 2018 by winning the Beit Shemesh mayoralty as an independent with 50.6 percent, defeating incumbent Moshe Abutbul. In the 2024 municipal election she advanced to a runoff against Shmuel Greenberg of Degel HaTorah, but lost after the ultra-Orthodox factions backed him, giving him 57.9 percent to her 42.1 percent. After that defeat she left the city council, and in September 2024 she was appointed YASA president and moved to Kiryat Shmona to help establish the new branch.