Rabbi Haim Drukman, the spiritual leader of religious Zionism in Israel, died Sunday night of Covid-19, at the age of 90, Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem announced.
A mentor to MK Bezalel Smotrich, who will be appointed finance minister in the next government of Benjamin Netanyahu, Rabbi Drukman was for decades the most prominent religious figure in the Zionist cult, which accounts for around 12% of Israel’s Jewish population.
“The Jewish people are losing one of the spiritual giants of his generation, a just man, an educator, a man who dedicated his life to Torah, the Jewish people and the land of Israel,” Bezalel 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 valued highly.”
In Parliament for 14 years
Born in 1932 in Poland, Drukman escaped deportation during World War II and emigrated to Palestine in 1944 under the British Mandate.
A student 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, 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 served 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 ultra-Orthodox-led Israeli rabbinate.
In 1993, he was injured in a Palestinian shooting in his car, in which his driver was killed. He received the prestigious Israel Prize in 2012 for his contribution to society.
Source: BFM TV
