JERUSALEM -- If the Labor Party wins Israel's upcoming elections, the Jewish state may, for the first time, offer civil marriages and public transportation on Shabbat.

One Israel -- the larger-than-Labor election ticket that Labor leader Ehud Barak has formed with David Levy's Gesher movement and the politically moderate religious movement Meimad -- was born this week.

The coalition, which boasts both authentic Sephardi and Orthodox components, is expected to advocate a cancellation of the religious status quo, Ha'aretz reported this week.

According to the Israeli daily, these changes are included in the understanding drawn up between Labor and Meimad and would serve as the basis for a coalition agreement.

The understanding draws from the "new covenant" on religion and state initiated last year by Labor Knesset member Yossi Beilin, Third Way Knesset member Alex Lubotzky and representatives from Meimad.

In response to the Ha'aretz article, senior Labor Party members this week began trying to block the inclusion of the clause changing the religious status quo in the party's platform for the upcoming May elections, fearing it could alienate potential Orthodox voters.

The newspaper said the agreement would allow public transportation on the Jewish Sabbath, as determined by the local authorities, based on the needs and character of the population.

In contrast, all business and commercial transactions would be barred, with the exception of cultural, sport and leisure activities.

The agreement would also call for the establishment of a framework for civil marriages in Israel, something that does not now exist.

Recent surveys have shown that a high percentage of Israelis would like the option of civil marriages, rather than the current requirement that all marriages be authorized through the Orthodox rabbinate.

Beilin, who negotiated the understanding with Meimad, was quoted by Ha'aretz as saying the changes in the status quo would require a coalition under Barak to pass several pieces of legislation.

Labor will appear in the May 17 election not as Labor, but as One Israel. The No. 3 slot on the party list, after Barak and Shimon Peres, will feature Levy, the longtime Likud minister and popular Moroccan-born blue-collar leader. There will be one member of Meimad and two more representatives of Gesher among the first 30 names.

Levy has been promised a senior portfolio. The presumption is that he would return to the Foreign Ministry. He resigned as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's foreign minister last year, over differences related to peace policy and particularly over social policy.

Levy regards himself and his Gesher Party as the mouthpiece for a large proportion of the 200,000 unemployed Sephardim in the country. He charges the Netanyahu government with "Thatcherite" policies that have impoverished whole communities.

His commitment to One Israel is a meaningful coup for Barak, who in 1997 publicly asked the Sephardi community's "forgiveness" for wrongs that the Labor movement, out of insensitivity and hubris, had done to Sephardi immigrants in the early years of the state.

It signals, at least symbolically, that the gesture has resonated at least with some of the North African immigrants to whom it was chiefly directed.

Levy himself arrived in Israel as a youngster from Morocco, and worked as a bricklayer in the poor development town of Beit Shean before embarking, through the unions, on his meteoric political career.

Meimad's accession is another feather in the Labor leader's cap. Barak's hard line against draft avoidance of the fervently religious and on yeshiva budgets has drawn dire threats of ballot-box retribution from the religious community.