Josef “Tommy” Lapid, the scourge of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jews, emerged as the biggest surprise in the January 2003 elections, leading his Shinui (Change) party to become the third-largest faction in parliament. Campaigning on an anti-clerical, anti-corruption platform he was instrumental in increasing his party’s block of seats in the Knesset from six to fifteen and declared that he would “change the face of Israeli society”.

Lapid, who had entered the Knesset only in 1999 in his late sixties, campaigned fiercely against statesubsidised Judaism and against the laws that enabled Orthodox Jews to claim exemption from military service to pursue religious studies, but qualify for tax and security benefits.

Labour Party politicians routinely compared Lapid to Archie Bunker — the armchair reactionary in the long-running American television sitcom. But this did not appear to worry him. “I take it as a compliment,” he once said. “I do look like him and I am — how do you say — pugnacious.”

He called the religious “a minority that has privileges and no responsibilities. Others have to defend them and others have to work for them, and have to be grateful to them for praying. My support is partly a revolt of the secular, liberal-minded modern Israeli against this type of ghettoisation”.

Lapid built up an enthusiastic following among Israel’s Ashkenazi middle classes with roots in Eastern and Central Europe, and from voters impatient with the stalemate over the Palestinians and over sleaze and corruption. His party policy favoured lower taxes and ruled out negotiations with the Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat.

After the 2003 election success he proclaimed that as part of a peace settlement Israel should withdraw from most settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and that the Palestinians should be given some form of autonomy in Jerusalem. For their part, he said, Palestinians should give up their demand that Palestinian refugees be repatriated inside Israel.

In his victory speech Lapid tried to assuage fears that he was anti- religious. But his image was not helped by a cartoon of the Ascent of Man in his office depicting the progress of mankind from an ape to a black-garbed religious Jew. He dismissed accusations of anti-Semitism, pointing out that he was one of the last Holocaust survivors in the Knesset, and that the Nazis killed his father and a dozen members of his family.

Josef Lapid was born Tomislav Lampel in 1931 in the Danube city of Novi Sad, Yugoslavia (now Serbia), into a family of Hungarian Jews. When the Germans invaded Yugoslavia in 1941 his family was among those detained by the Nazis and he spent the war in the Budapest ghetto. His father did not survive the Holocaust but he and his mother did, and emigrated to Israel in 1948 when he was 17.

He entered the law school at Tel Aviv University, after which he pursued a highly successful career as a writer, playwright, radio and television commentator and newspaper editorialist, beginning as a journalist on the newspaper Maariv. He went on to become director-general of the Israel Broadcasting Authority and was a popular television personality, notably as one of the hosts of the Channel 1 show Popolitika, noted for its humorous take on political events.

When, in the late 1990s, he joined Avraham Poraz’s Shinui party, he observed of his decision to exchange his pen for politics: “All my life I was a dog barking at the caravan. Now I am one of the camels.”

He soon became party chairman with Poraz as his deputy, and his dynamic leadership was a significant factor in boosting the party’s prominence on the Israeli political scene. He was among its six members who gained Knesset seats in the elections of 1999.

After Shinui’s 2003 electoral success it was invited to join the Government of Ariel Sharon as a coalition partner, and Lapid was appointed Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Minister. But cordial relations with the governing party did not long survive the induction of the hardline Orthodox party Agugat Israel into the coalition.

Lapid found that such cherished projects as the institution of civil marriages were blocked, and he left the coalition in December 2004 after an impasse over state aid for religious institutions. Tensions developed within Shinui, and Poraz and a number of its Knesset members left the party to form another secularist party, Hetz, which Lapid subsequently supported.

But he left the Knesset in 2006, at which Hetz did not gain a seat, and resumed his media career as a newspaper columnist and television commentator. In July 2006 he was appointed chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust remembrance authority and museum.

He is survived by his wife Shulamit, an author, and by two children, one of whom, Yair, is a popular TV host in Israel. A daughter, Michal, was killed in a car accident.

Josef “Tommy” Lapid, journalist and former Israeli Justice Minister, was born on December 27, 1931. He died of cancer on June 1, 2008, aged 76