Bennett's "Miracle" Explained

Israel’s new prime minister is probably the first one who has stuck a wad of chewing gum to his head right before a public event.

Naftali Bennett, who took office this week, is the first prime minister in the country’s history to regularly wear a kippah, or Jewish ritual head covering. Unlike his secular predecessors, he identifies as a religious Zionist and practices Modern Orthodox Judaism, which requires men to cover their heads.

He’s also bald. That makes it a challenge to keep the small crocheted disc on the back of his head, where it’s traditionally worn. The traditional methods of securing a kippah — bobby pins and metal hair clips — are of no use to Bennett.

Yet it stays on. No matter where Bennett is — in parliament, on the campaign trail, giving a news interview — the kippah is there, mounted on his scalp, or sometimes on the thin layer of buzzed hair that surrounds his bald spot.

Appearing on a comedy talk show in 2013, when he was a freshman lawmaker, Bennett said that he uses a mixture of tape and gravity to keep the kippah on his head.

But once, he recalled, he had to give a speech outdoors in the wind and discovered that he was out of tape. So he took a piece of chewing gum  and used it to glue the kippah to his head.

“I had to improvise,” he said. “So we MacGyvered it.”

Bennett doesn’t use ordinary Scotch tape. His adhesive of choice is a product invented and sold beginning in 2013 by Haim Levin, a 65-year-old bus driver living in a largely Modern Orthodox suburb of Tel Aviv.

The product, called the Kipa Keeper, is made of reusable hypoallergenic double-sided medical tape, which allows the kippah to stick to heads with little to no hair. It’s sold in packs of 40 and costs 40 shekels, about $12.50, including delivery. Levin declined to say how many he sells each year.

“It was Yom Kippur, when everyone in synagogue bows down [to the ground] and prostrates themselves, and I saw that 20 to 30% of the worshippers had their kippah fall to the floor,” Levin, himself a bald kippah-wearer, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I realized I had to come up with an idea for the kippah to stay on the head.”

Levin doesn’t remember exactly when Bennett began using his product — a source close to Bennett confirmed to JTA that the prime minister uses it — but says he got in touch with the future Israeli leader in the hope of boosting sales. They took a photo together in 2015 in Bennett’s office, when he was economy minister. Levin told JTA that Bennett last ordered the product a week and a half ago.

“It really helped,” Levin told JTA regarding his outreach to Bennett. “There are still people who call them ‘Bennett’s stickers.'”