JERUSALEM, Israel – Thousands of Israelis, including Prime Minister-Designate Benjamin Netanyahu and President Chaim Herzog, braved rain and cool temperatures Monday to attend the funeral of Rabbi Chaim Druckman, spiritual leader of the Religious Zionists and former Knesset member. Druckman, who helped launch the founding of settlement movement of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, died Sunday at age 90 in Jerusalem.
In eulogizing Druckman, President Herzog said, “Today, we have lost one of the greatest disciples of Rabbi Akiva, one of the greatest Torah scholars in our times. Rabbi Druckman’s life was full of doing, full of achievements.”
Netanyahu also praised Druckman at the funeral, held near the Israeli port of Ashdod, calling him a close personal friend. “Rabbi Druckman invested his entire soul in each and every student, in each and every educator and yeshiva, in the Bnei Akiva movement, in military academies, in the settlements,” Netanyahu said, and added, “He did not shrink from waging war on the matters that go to the heart of the state – the integrity of the land, national values, educating the youth toward a Jewish identity, halting terrorism, and ensuring the strength of the IDF.”
Druckman lived just long enough to see the success of the Relgious Zionist Party in the November 1st elections. The party won 14 seats, making it the third largest party in the current Knesset.
After the 1967 Six-Day War, Druckman was a leading proponent of expanding Jewish communities in the territories Israel captured in Gaza, the Sinai and Judea and Samaria (the West Bank).
Druckman once headed the State Conversion Authority and found himself in the thick of one of the most contentious issues the country currently faces, as he worked to liberalize the rules of eligibility for who is considered Jewish and allowed to immigrate to Israel. His efforts angered many of the ultra-Orthodox rabbis, and his rulings were nullified by rabbinic courts. However the rabbinic decision was later overturned by the state High Court of Justice.
Concerning Druckman’s actions, Netanyahu recalled, “When he completed his tenure as head of the State Conversion Authority, I told him, ‘You stood as a genius among all of the criticism about state conversions in order to bring back those sons and daughters.’”
Religious Zionist Party leader Bezalel Smotrich, in line to become the country’s next finance minister, asked, “What will I do without you? Without the smile, without the hug, without the warm handshake? What will we do without your dedication, without your responsibility, without you to bear the burden?”
Druckman was born in 1932, in what is now Ukraine, but was then part of Poland. He survived the Holocaust when he hid with his parents, then immigrated to Palestine in 1944, masquerading as the son of a couple who was, in fact, childless. His parents later reunited with him in Israel.
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