The town of Yeruham was one of Israel’s earliest development towns, created to settle the frontier during the first years of the state. Mostly populated by North African Jews in the early years, it has struggled to survive from day one.By 2005, this small, isolated town of less than ten thousand people in the southern Negev desert was bankrupt, its citizens were moving away and businesses were closing down. Yeruham led the region in unemployment with a rate of 14.3 percent. Called a “backwater” by the influential daily newspaper Ha’aretz, Yeruham seemed to have lost all hope.

With Yeruham mired in deep debt, Baruch Elmakaias, the incumbent mayor, was dismissed in an unprecedented manner by Israel’s central government and replaced for a period of five years by an emergency committee led by Mitzna.

Mitzna describes the situation, “People that could, left town and the town, that from the beginning was a very remote one in the periphery of the country, geographically and socially, became the most unprivileged place in Israel.”

Inside his barebones office, Mitzna offers me a cup of mint tea and speaks about the change he has initiated. “The reason any progress has been made in Yeruham [since my arrival] is because I’m working like a bureaucrat and not a politician. By bypassing the electoral game, and not being beholden to any pressure groups or public polls, I am free to do what I feel is necessary, without having to worry about re-election.”

TURNAROUND

In fact, Mitzna, for all his history as a commander, is a modern and progressive politician, and for all his failings in the national theatre, he has bloomed in a local setting. The former mayor of Haifa has rediscovered his roots.

It is easy to see that Mitzna is revitalized by the struggle to bring Yeruham back from the brink. As he describes his self-appointed mission “[I] decided from the beginning that our challenge is not just to bring back normality. It was to put Yeruham on [a] runway which will bring it to prosperity. A fundamental change of image is required to allow it to continue even after the committee will leave.”

Part of what makes his administration so successful, he argues, is his openness and willingness to bring the community into governance. He has established several citizen committees on issues facing the town and has implemented an open door policy in his municipality offices, as well as organizing a yearly community wide meeting where the citizens can debate the issues.

Municipal funding comes from a combination of taxes and grants from Israel’s central government. Mitzna proudly relates how he has brought tax collection levels up to ninety percent, which has helped supplement the emergency funds allocated by the Israeli government.

He claims, however, that the emergency funds allocated when he was appointed to his position are insufficient and he has begun haunting the various ministries in Jerusalem, using his name and contacts to bring in additional revenue to fund his infrastructure and revitalization projects.

“We got a lot of help from the government which allowed us to pay our debts and to reach fiscal balance,” Mitzna states, “Unfortunately now, the situation is not as it was the last four years because the government is cutting the budget across the board in all the municipalities.”

The former commander has also been trying to supplement decreasing government handouts by capitalizing on his name recognition to fundraise abroad. The city of Yeruham maintains ties with the Jewish Federation of Miami through the Jewish Agency, and Mitzna has made several successful fundraising trips.

RESULTS:

The community center, closed for lack of funds, has been reopened, a technological park was recently completed and put on the market and the chief construction engineer of both the World Trade Center and Disney World, Hy Brown, has decided to open the main manufacturing facility for his start-up company Real-Housing in Yeruham.

Mitzna has also overseen the opening of two new schools for the town’s Orthodox community and has shored up the crumbling infrastructure.

It remains to be seen what lasting impact Mitzna’s work will have. While he has stemmed the tide of emigration, and the town has begun seeing businesses and residents return, his success has been partly built upon personal connections and his own name recognition.

It is hoped that the changes, in encouraging business growth and especially in the self-image of the Yeruhamites, will be enough to make the town’s improvements self-sustaining.

One thing is for certain, Mitzna, while shunning popularity, has an approval rating most politicians would die for.

The local residents are very happy with Mitzna and are very vocal in their support of their appointee mayor. When asked about their thoughts on next November’s election, when Amram Mitzna will step aside to allow the locals to take charge of their city once again, residents said that a Yeruham without Mitzna would be impossible. In their consideration, he must remain at the helm. When I asked a local shopkeeper and his customers if they minded that he was an outsider, the only response was to point to the community center across the way and rhetorically ask, “He reopened the center and he brought back business, didn’t he?”

The mayor makes no bones about being an outsider. He maintains a small flat in Yeruham, and returns to Haifa on Thursdays to spend the weekend with his family.

However, Mitzna uses this position to his advantage and is fond of pointing out that by being an outsider, he can be concerned with the wellbeing of the community as a whole and that this is the secret to his success.

BUSINESS

Yeruham weathered the recent economic downturn fairly well, according to Mitzna. This was due to the conservative nature of the businesses operating in the town. American firms such as Agis-Perrigo, the producers of Careline cosmetics, operate in Yeruham, and with the benefits that the Israeli government offers to firms willing to operate in the periphery, Mitzna hopes that the new technological park he built will soon fill up with high-tech ventures..

REDEMPTION GOES BOTH WAYS

For a man who claims that he felt useless in the Knesset, Yeruham was a godsend. The former soldier feels that public service is an integral part of his worldview and that if he cannot affect things on a macro-level, he would like to see himself helping out on a local level.

Even Mitzna’s harshest critics cannot but acknowledge that Mitzna did not decide to leave his family behind in Haifa and spend his golden years in a small town in the Negev for personal glory.

In finding his cause, Mitzna has not only helped to redeem the town of Yeruham, but also his own image.