The Roots of Haredi Antipathy Toward Israel

Sunday, September 29^th came three days before Rosh Hashanah, at the height of the Selihot period when religious Jews are supposed to be engaged in introspection, repentance and reconciliation with their fellow Jews.

It is on this day that a coalition of American haredi roshei yeshiva and hassidic rebbes chose to stage a mass gathering in Lakewood, New Jersey whose galvanizing focus was a hostility to the State of Israel and its military.

The timing was exquisite; occurring on both the cusp of the High Holy Days and in the midst of an existential war that Israel is fighting. This war is of as much relevance to the viability of haredi society as it is to all Israelis and, indeed, to Jews around the world.

The pashkevills and ads calling for participation in this event referred to the IDF as “their army”, eerily reminiscent of the sentiments of the wicked son of the Passover Haggadah who is rebuked for excluding himself from the Jewish nation:

The wicked one, what does he say? “What is this service to you?!” He says `to you,’ but not to him! By thus excluding himself from the community he has denied that which is fundamental. You, therefore, blunt his teeth and say to him: “It is because of this that the Lord did for me when I left Egypt”; `for me’ – but not for him! If he had been there, he would not have been redeemed!”

Among the institutions that were primary signatories to the invitation was my alma mater, Yeshiva Torah Vodaath in Brooklyn, and its current Rosh Yeshiva, Yitzchak Abba Lichtenstein.

I was first enrolled in Torah Vodaath as a 7^th grader in 1961, one year before Lichtenstein was born. By that time, the yeshiva was already hostile to Zionism, with participation in Zionist activity being strictly forbidden. No Bnei Akiva members could be found among the student body. Such membership would be considered grounds for expulsion.

Nevertheless, at that time, this draconian stricture had more to do with the fact that the religious Zionist Bnei Akiva was co-ed than with any deep-seated hatred of Israel. This was certainly true regarding senior roshei yeshiva, headed at the time by Rabbi Yaakov Kaminetzky. The roshei yeshiva were, at worst, agnostic regarding the Zionist enterprise. They were more focused on Gemara than on ideologies, and were not known for fixating on emerging haredi minutiae (humrot) which have since then become de rigeur. Indeed, the iconic black hat had not yet surfaced. A black homburg was worn only by those roshei yeshiva who were also congregational rabbis, for which such a headdress was part of the uniform.

In the early 1960s, antipathy toward Zionism was more the domain of lower level, American-born fanatics who had become rebbes and principals of the elementary and secondary divisions. These were men of middling academic talent, never destined to become formal leaders. Yet, their intellectual mediocrity was by far exceeded by a fierce frum fanaticism that drove their vocational choice and positioned them to become the tail that wags the American Orthodox dog. The haredism we know today was always driven from the bottom up, not from the top down

What few people knew, even then, was that Torah Vodaath was founded in 1917 as an overtly Zionist day school. Its founding principal was Rabbi Wolf (Zeev) Gold (1889-1956) who became a leading light of religious Zionism. Rabbi Gold emigrated to pre-state Israel in 1935 and was a signatory to Israel’s Declaration on Independence. At the Torah Vodaath he founded, the school week would end on Fridays with the singing of Hatikvah.

During the following four decades Torah Vodaath would grow from an elementary school into a major institution that went from kindergarten through semicha (rabbinical ordination).

Starting in the 1920s, under the legendary leadership of Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz (1886-1948) Torah Vodaath became America’s flagship yeshiva, providing rabbis and educators for synagogues and day schools across America, as well as chaplains for the American military.

Torah Vodaath’s rabbinical students were expected, if only tacitly, to simultaneously acquire college degrees. Indeed, at one time in the 1940s, Torah Vodaath had all the paperwork ready to launch an accredited college of its own. This plan was quashed by the father of American Orthodox fanaticism, Rabbi Aaron Kotler, founder of the Lakewood yeshiva which spearheaded Sunday’s event.

Over the course of its first four decades, Torah Vodaath gradually evolved from being outright Zionist, to being favorable toward Zionism and a Jewish state, to becoming downright hostile.

During the 1940s, essays in the Torah Vodaath high school yearbooks would express the yearning for a Jewish state. In the early 1950’s – after the establishment of Israel – the yearbook covers were adorned with illustrations of Mount Sinai encircled by the flag of Israel.

Mr. Mendlowitz (he refused to be called rabbi) was himself a renegade. Although inordinately religious, he had broken away from his Hungarian Hassidic roots to become an adherent of Samson Raphael Hirsch’s “Torah im Derech Eretz” philosophy. Hirschian thinking espoused a combination of devout religious adherence with professional and cultural worldliness.

Mr. Mendlowitz did not keep a radio in his home, yet he borrowed one for the 29^th of November 1947 when the UN would vote whether to allow the partition of Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish state. Mendlowitz was glued to the radio during the count, and is said to have danced for joy and recited a blessing when the final tally paved the way for the formal establishment of Medinat Israel.

With the declaration of the State of Israel, Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz dispatched his very able and charismatic son-in-law, Rabbi Alexander Linchner (1908-1997) – who was at that time the secular studies principal of Mesivta Torah Vodaath – to establish Boys Town Jerusalem. The new institution would be a residential campus that would provide boys from deprived homes with a rigorous education and vocational training. The word “Zionism” was not formally used in describing Boys Town, yet it was clearly a boon to the Zionist enterprise, producing class after class of graduates who contributed greatly to the capabilities of the IDF and to Israeli society as a whole.

And yet, barely a decade later, the then principle of Mesivta Torah Vodaath’s religious studies department, Rabbi Nesanel Quinn (1910-2005) would rip up a photo of the saintly Klausenburger Rebbe, Yekusiel Yehudah Halberstam (1905-1994), being greeted by David Ben Gurion upon his aliyah to Israel in 1960. Rabbi Halberstam, among his many achievements, built the Laniado Hospital in Netanya.

The big question is, what caused this sea change in the attitude of an institution like Torah Vodaath toward Israel, and the fact that today, a century after its founding, it would take a lead in anti-Israel action on erev Rosh Hashanah when Israel is at war for its very life?

Citizens of Israel today may be upset with haredi political parties on account of their partisan grifting and the use of their demographic political weight to keep their constituents from playing any contributing role in the defense of the State. However, what they fail to grasp is the extent of the duplicitous role played by Agudath Israel and its party offshoots in their historic nurturing of anti-Israel animus among diaspora Orthodoxy.

While the Old Yishuv and Neturei Karta in Jerusalem trumpeted their loathing of Zionism, they at least had the integrity to reject any direct benefits from the Zionist State, and would refuse to participate in its elections. Agudath Israel was no less opposed to the establishment of Israel. However, unlike its kindred spirits in the Old Yishuv and Neturei Karta, it seized the opportunity to milk the newborn state by way of the establishment of a political party that would pay lip service to the new state’s legitimacy.

This Agudath Israel party would never sing Hatikvah. It would never celebrate Yom Haatzmaut. It woud never fly the flag of Israel. It would never commemorate the soldiers who had died in creating and defending the State. It would offer no prayers for the welfare of Israel or its soldiers in its affiliated synagogues. It would almost never send its sons to the army. And it would never, until very recently – when its duplicitousness reached full maturity – allow any of its Knesset Members to become an official government minister as this would require an oath of allegiance to the Jewish State. Of course, through the rabbinic gift for self-serving solutions, they finagled a new status called ‘Deputy Minister’ which would have all the power and trappings of ministry without being one ‘technically’.

Back in the 1950s, Yeshivah Toras Emes in Boro Park was a loyal offshoot of the Mendlowitz-era Torah Vodaath. This elementary school’s benign and dapper dean, Rabbi Elias Schwartz, was a musmach of Torah Vodaath and, rather typically, also the rabbi of a Young Israel congregation in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Like every Young Israel, its Torah ark was flanked by the flag of Israel. The Toras Emes school choir performed Zionist songs almost exclusively at the yeshiva’s annual dinner.

However, slowly and insidiously, the Agudath Israel in Israel would inveigle itself into the American Orthodox community. Already in the early 1950’s, a representative of Agudath Israel’s independent (although mostly government-funded) Chinuch Atzmai school system would commandeer the children enrolled in schools like Toras Emes to spend the Rosh Hashanah, Chanukah and Pesach seasons collecting tzedakah money for Chinuch Atzmai.

The organization’s ringleader in America, one Henoch Cohen, would address an assembly of the children to explain to them how Israel is the enemy of Yiddishkeit and how the treif government of Israel was doing everything it its power to “shmad” (i.e. forcibly convert) Yiddishe kinder. And how, without Chinuch Atzmai there would be no Torah education in Eretz Yisroel. Indeed, without us children pestering every passerby with our pushkas, there would be no Chinuch Atzmai at all.

In these school assemblies, Henoch Cohen would caution us to keep this information to ourselves and to use the anodyne pitch “Please help the poor people of Israel” as we would vigorously shake our canisters.

Henoch Cohen was not the only such character. Two other organizations with similar agendas, Pe’ilim and Tashbar, would exhort us go out to collect for them on alternate occasions. Among their blandishments was the description of soldiers in Israel being forced to use razor blades for shaving, unless we raised money for electric shavers.

And thus we would be recipients of a mixed message; the gradually dying voice in support of Israel and the ever-increasing stridency of the indictment of Zionism and the Jewish State.

It should be noted that this was a time when very few people visited Israel. The American Jewish public knew only what it heard from emissaries of the various parties in the newborn State. To the extent this was true for the general Jewish public, it was especially so for those who belonged to a gradually emerging haredi society whose epicenter was Torah Vodaath.

The schnorrers of Chinuch Atzmai, Pe’ilim and Tashbar were not the only hostile horse whisperers in the frum community. Indeed the most notorious and brazen was the very well-fed and well-heeled MK Rabbi Menachem Porush, father of the no less well-fed and well-heeled Meir Porush who now occupies his family’s hereditary Knesset seat. It should be noted that this was the time of “tzena” of major food shortages and rationing in Israel. One would never know this from the robust proportions of MK Menachem Porush

Rabbi Porush would visit America annually where he would be received with great honor and fanfare by a naïve public of religious Jews. His arrival would be especially celebrated by those belonging to the American branch of Agudath Israel whose members had not yet been infected by the virulent Israel-bashing virus. Yet, over the course of several years, MK Porush pere managed to change all that. He would make a grand appearance at Camp Agudah, the organization’s summer camp, and make it his business to poison a generation of impressionable young minds with an uncompromising hatred of Israel.

Of even greater impact was MK Porush’s ready access to the offices of America’s roshei yeshiva and leading rabbanim, often accompanied by the clean-shaven, oleaginous leader of the American Agudah, Rabbi Morris (later Moshe) Sherer. This duo would bend the ears of the innocent rabbanim with horror stories about Israel.

It is doubtful that Porush and Sherer succeeded in making the sages share their hostility to Zionism. But clearly their pestering helped mute any disagreement from the top.

However, where the Agudah was wildly successful was in co-opting the low and mid-ranking educators in America’s Torah institutions – the elementary and high school rebbeim and menahalim – and the young lions and cubs of America’s Tzeirei and Pirchei Agudath Israel which featured youth groups, minyans, melave malkas and other celebrations that provided fertile opportunities for indoctrination. Outside of the forbidden Bnei Akiva, the Pirchei and Tzeirei were the only game in town (along with their sister organizations Bnos and N’shei).

They were enormously successful in grooming a new generation that hankered for a heretofore unknown – and ever intensifying – degree of ‘frumkeit’. And this was inextricably intertwined with an equally ferocious loathing for Zionism.

By the mid 1960s, the job of Israel’s Agudah was pretty much done. Zionism was a dirty word. Emotional and ideological disconnect from Israel as a state was absolute. At the same time there was solid dedication to those forces in Israel that had no compunctions about filching government financing for a sector that had no interest in playing a constructive role in the society as a whole.

By the early 1970s, the eponymous Black Hat had already made its appearance, along with the requisite black suit, white shirt and hanging tzitzit, thereby creating a ubiquitous uniform and enforced conformity.

No doubt then, as now, there were some less hidebound souls who might secretly and not so secretly harbor doubts about the prevailing extremism and hostility. But such voices never gained much traction for fear of the social repercussions of such independent thinking.

The Torah Vodaath of today places little emphasis on secular studies, and none on the need for higher education. Its leaders are as ignorant of their own institution’s origins as they are of the values and priorities that defined its noblest founding fathers. Like its contemporary counterparts in Jerusalem and Bnei Brak, Torah Vodaath programs its young to be haredi – fearful – not so much of God as of anyone who is unlike themselves, and of any knowledge that might be considered secular.

It is inconceivable that men like Zev Gold, Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz, Alexander Linchner or even Yaakov Kaminetsky would ever have allowed their yeshiva to endorse the circus that took place in Lakewood on the first day of Selihot, September 29^th of this year. Indeed, we have a lot to be ungrateful for to the Agudath Israel movement, and we should be genuinely concerned about men like Yitzchak Goldknopf and Moshe Gafni having any say in government policy, let lone any hand in the public till.