What factors facilitate the success of religious movements in democratic societies? What are the micro-mechanisms of mobilization used by relgiopolitical actors? This paper investigates these questions by comparing the political success stories of the Shas movement in Israel and the National Outlook Movement (NOM) in Turkey in the 1990s. Comparing religiopolitical movements in Turkey and Israel constitutes a “most different” case design and provides analytical leverage to control for alternative explanations in the literature. The analysis in the paper is centered on two theoretically important arguments, both borrowing insights from the Social Movement Theory (SMT) (Snow and Benford, 1988; Benford and Snow, 2000; Meyer, 2004). The first argument focuses on the contextual variables that define the opportunity structures for the fledgling religiopolitical movements in both countries. This part of the analysis demonstrates how the politicization of a historical socio-cultural cleavage through social change, such as rural-urban immigration, increasing literacy, and school integration ripened opportunities for both movements by making the grievances of the marginalized segments in each society more acute. Moreover, state incorporation of religious actors created a second set of opportunity structures by granting religious actors access to state institutions which were later effectively used by religious entrepreneurs to carry their messages to appropriate audiences. The second part of the analysis focuses on how framing processes mediate between political opportunity structures and collective behavior. In this part, I discuss how injustice frames, prognostic frames, and empowerment frames were utilized by religious entrepreneurs. I argue that these frames led to successful mobilization, because they i) resonated with the target audiences’ socio-cultural grievances; ii) were articulated by credible agents (i.e. activists of religious movements); and iii) were disseminated to the larger society through social networks built in poor neighborhoods. The paper provides a contribution to an emerging trend in the study of Middle Eastern politics where area specialists integrate the theoretical tools of SMT to their analyses of religious activism in different contexts in the region (Munson, 2001; Wickham, 2002; Wiktorowicz, 2004; Clark, 2004). The paper’s comparative focus on Shas and NOM establishes an argument against essentialist understandings of Islam by illustrating similarities between Islamic and Judaic movements’ political activism. Moreover, the paper shows how, in the absence of alternatives, religiopolitical movements can become the carriers of identity demands by successfully empowering the disenfranchised through political frames and by carrying their political voice to the center of politics.