Rabbi Drukman has died of complications from Covid-19 at the age of 90.
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 finance minister in Benjamin Netanyahu’s next government, was for decades the most prominent religious figure in the Zionist cult, which makes up 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 Benjamin Netanyahu offered his condolences to the familyand affirmed that “the State of Israel has lost a great spiritual leader and I have lost a personal friend who I hold dear”.
14 years in Parliament
Born in Poland in 1932, Drukman escaped deportation during World War II and emigrated to Palestine in 1944 under the British mandate.
A disciple of Rabbi Tzvi Yehouda 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 the 1990s.
He entered politics in 1977 within the National Religious Party (PNR), an ally of Menachem Begin’s Likud, and sat in 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.
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Original article published on BFMTV.com
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