Shas Yosef received strategic help and guidance from Rabbi Elazar Shach, leader of Israel's non-Hasidic Haredi Ashkenazi Jews. Yosef founded the party in 1984 on the platform of a return to religion, and as a counter to an establishment dominated by Ashkenazi Jews of European extraction. Not all Shas voters are themselves ultra-Orthodox. Many of its voters are Modern Orthodox and traditional Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews, due to its alignment with the promotion of an "authentic Middle Eastern" Israeli culture, which fits with traditional Zionist beliefs of a revival of authentic, non-Europeanized Jewish culture. However, it still represents the Sephardi and
Modern Hebrew phonology of modern Hebrew are Oriental and Non-Oriental. Oriental Hebrew was chosen as the preferred accent for Israel by the Academy of the Hebrew Language, but has since declined in popularity. The description in this article follows the language as it is pronounced by native Israeli speakers of the younger generations. According to the Academy of the Hebrew Language, in the 1880s (the time of the beginning of the Zionist movement and the Hebrew revival) there were three groups of Hebrew regional accents: Ashkenazi (Eastern European), Sephardi (Southern European), and Mizrahi (Middle Eastern, Iranian, and North African). Over time features of