Rabbi Drukman has died of complications from Covid-19, aged 90.
Rabbi Haim Drukman, the spiritual leader of religious Zionism in Israel, died Sunday evening from Covid-19, at the age of 90, Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem announced.
Mentor of MP Betzalel Smotrich, who is to be appointed Minister of Finance in the next government of Benjamin NetanyahuRabbi Drukman was for decades the most important religious figure in the Zionist religious currentwhich 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-designate Benjamin Netanyahu offered his condolences to the familyassuring that “the State of Israel had lost a great spiritual leader, and I lost a personal friend whom I esteemed very much”.
In Parliament for 14 years
Born in 1932 in Poland, Drukman escaped deportation during the Second World War and immigrated to Palestine in 1944 under British mandate.
A student 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 .
Entering politics in 1977 within the National Religious Party (PNR), an ally of Menachem Begin’s Likud, he had sat in the Knesset (Parliament) for 14 years. Responsible for conversions to Judaism in the Prime Minister’s office in the late 1990s, he advocated a more liberal policy than that imposed by the Israeli rabbinate, run by ultra-Orthodox.
In 1993, he was injured by a Palestinian shooting at his car, an attack in which his driver was killed. He received the prestigious Israel Prize in 2012 for his contribution to society.
Original article published on BFMTV.com
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