Avi Maoz
The founder of the Noam party in 2019, Avi Maoz headed the National Jewish Identity Authority from 2022 to 2025, a government body with a budget of 120 to 165 million shekels. His party, renamed Noam for Israel in 2026, advocates the authority of the Chief Rabbinate and opposes LGBT rights.
- Ideology
- Radical religious-nationalist right, socially conservative
- Current role
- Chairman of the Noam for Israel party
- Born
- July 6, 1956Haifa
Key takeaways
- 01
Founder of the Noam party in 2019, with a radical religious-nationalist and socially conservative platform.
- 02
Headed the National Jewish Identity Authority from 2022 to 2025, with a budget of 120 to 165 million shekels.
- 03
Resigns from the government for good in 2025, denouncing a “deep state” in the Ministries of Justice and Education.
- 04
Party renamed Noam for Israel in 2026, recruiting, among others, Eliyahu Libman, the father of a hostage killed on October 7, 2023.
- 05
Leads the independent Noam for Israel list in the October 27, 2026 elections and refuses to withdraw (October 2026).
Controversies
In December 2022, described the Jerusalem Pride march as an “abomination of promiscuity,” a statement to which Netanyahu responded by promising to maintain the status quo on LGBT rights.
Born Avigdor Fischheimer on July 6, 1956, in the Kiryat Shmuel neighborhood of Haifa to Holocaust-survivor parents, Avi Maoz serves in the IDF from 1975 and co-founds the settlement of Migdal Oz in Gush Etzion in 1977, becoming its kibbutz secretary. He studies at a yeshiva from 1980 to 1991, within Rabbi Zvi Tau's religious-nationalist movement. His career before the Knesset is in public administration: a director at the Ministry of the Interior under Natan Sharansky (1999), a director at the Ministry of Construction and Housing under Effi Eitam, then director-general of Yisrael BaAliyah.
He founds the Noam party on July 15, 2019, believing that the existing right-wing parties do not give enough weight to “traditional Jewish values.” He enters the Knesset in 6th position on the joint Religious Zionism—Otzma Yehudit list in 2021 (six seats), and is reelected in 2022. This joint list splits into three factions on November 20, 2022.
Under the coalition agreement signed on November 27, 2022, he becomes a deputy minister in the Prime Minister's Office, responsible for the new National Jewish Identity Authority, with a budget set at 120 million shekels in 2023 and then 165 million in 2024. He resigns for the first time on February 27, 2023, over the failure to honor coalition commitments, then returns in May 2023 to head the Authority. He resigns again on March 24, 2025, denouncing a “deep state” that he accuses of having “taken control of the Ministries of Justice and Education” to impose a “hyper-progressive and anti-Jewish” outlook there. On July 16, 2025, he formally declares himself outside the coalition.
On December 1, 2022, he had described the Jerusalem Pride march as an “abomination of promiscuity,” promising to cancel it, a statement to which Netanyahu had publicly responded by promising that no changes would be made to the status quo on LGBT rights. In 2026, his party, renamed Noam for Israel, recruits, among others, Eliyahu Libman, the father of a hostage killed on October 7, 2023.
Under the November 2022 coalition agreement, Avi Maoz obtained the creation of a new National Jewish Identity Authority. It was initially promised 20 staff positions and 440 million shekels over its first two years. The government then set the Authority's annual budget at 120 million shekels for 2023 and 165 million for 2024, or 285 million shekels in total over the two years.
Maoz first resigned on February 27, 2023. He believed that the Jewish national identity program promised in the coalition agreement would not really be given to him. He returned three months later, in May 2023, after gaining authority to oversee education providers in public schools.
He resigned for good on March 24, 2025. He denounced a "deep state" that he said had taken control of the Justice and Education ministries. Specifically, he complained that the Education Ministry had stopped working with his office, that there was no extra budget for national-religious schools, and, more broadly, that his coalition agreement had not been honored. In his words, this left him "a deputy minister in name only." On July 16, 2025, he formally declared that he was no longer part of the coalition.