Rabbi Haim Drukman, the spiritual leader of religious Zionism in Israel, died of Covid-19 on Sunday evening at the age of 90, according to the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem.
Rabbi Drukman, mentor to MK Betzalel Smotrich, who is to be appointed Minister of Finance in Benjamin Netanyahu’s next government, was for decades the most important religious figure in the Zionist religious current, which represents about 12% of Israel’s Jewish population. “The Jewish people are losing one of the spiritual giants of their generation, a righteous man, an educator, a man who dedicated his life to the Torah, to the Jewish people and to the land of Israel,” Betzalel Smotrich said in a statement.
Israeli Prime Minister-elect Binyamin Netanyahu sent his condolences to the family, assuring that “the State of Israel has lost a great spiritual leader and I have lost a personal friend who I treasured very much”.
Born in Poland in 1932, he escaped deportation in World War II and emigrated to Palestine in 1944 under a British mandate. A disciple of Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook, the spiritual leader of the Gush Emounim (faith bloc), the movement that founded the settlements in the occupied West Bank after the 1967 war, he is considered one of his successors since entering politics in the 1990s joined the National Religious Party (NRP), an ally of Menachem Begin’s Likud, in 1977 and a member of the Knesset (parliament) for 14 years.
As prime minister in the late 1990s, responsible for conversions to Judaism, he advocated a more liberal policy than that of the Israeli rabbinate, which is run by ultra-Orthodox. In 1993, he was injured by a Palestinian shot at his car, an attack that killed his driver. In 2012 he received the prestigious Israel Prize for his contribution to society.