Has named no post for the next government. Recounting the 2022 talks in May 2026, he said he had dismissed Netanyahu's offer of the Housing Ministry and, on the Gerrer Rebbe's instruction, asked to be deputy prime minister instead.
Who they are
Yitzhak Goldknopf spent his working life running haredi schools and kindergartens before the Gur Rebbe sent him into politics. He was born in Jerusalem in 1950, the second son of Malka and Yehuda Aryeh Goldknopf, a composer and conductor in the Gur Hasidic movement, and studied at the Etz Chaim Talmud Torah and at the Imrei Emet and Sfat Emet yeshivot.
He worked as an educational director at a succession of Talmud Torah schools, ending at the Gur school in Jerusalem. In 1982 he set up an umbrella body that now covers about 170 Talmud Torah schools and thirty thousand children. He had joined his father at the Beit Yaakov network of kindergartens and day-care centres and took it over on his father’s death: about 400 classes and 15,000 children across twenty localities. In 1990 he opened Beit Petachya, a special-education body that today runs some 85 kindergartens. He is also secretary of the Committee of Rabbis for the Sanctity of the Sabbath, which under him campaigned against El Al and the Big chain.
The Gur Rebbe named him to head Agudat Yisrael’s central faction in place of Yaakov Litzman, and he went into the government as housing minister. He waived rent for public-housing tenants evacuated from their homes during the war and for the families of hostages. He left the government on 12 June 2025 over the failure to pass a law regulating the status of yeshiva students.
Positions and record
Draft: A blanket exemption law is the coalition's price.
Housing: Haredi cities and affordable construction.
Education: An independent stream without core-curriculum mandates.
Where they stand
Holds the party line on every issue.