A Station Built Because the Others Would Not Listen

When Kol BaRama went on the air in 2009, it entered a crowded field of Israeli talk and news radio, but its founders were not trying to compete with the field. Israel's Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, community had grown for decades without a mainstream broadcaster built for its own concerns: rabbinic rulings, yeshiva life, kosher certification news and the daily texture of a community that runs on a different rhythm than the secular Israeli mainstream, including full silence on the airwaves from Friday sunset to Saturday nightfall for Shabbat. Kol BaRama was built to fill that specific gap, licensed by Israel's Second Authority for Television and Radio and based in Bnei Brak, the Haredi city just east of Tel Aviv that is home to some of Israel's largest yeshivas and a dense concentration of ultra-Orthodox households.

From its earliest broadcasts the station carried talk, news and rabbinic commentary in Hebrew across three FM frequencies covering central Israel, Jerusalem and the south. It also became closely associated with the Shas political party led by Aryeh Deri, a relationship that shaped both its news coverage and its standing within Haredi communal politics. The station's founding filled a real gap in Israeli broadcasting. What it also did, in its first years on air, was draw a line the courts would later be asked to examine: no woman's voice was heard on Kol BaRama at all between 2009 and 2011.