I Will Await Him

  • Was Rav Kook a Zionist?

    It depends how you define the term. Yes, he supported settlement and hoped to see a Jewish state. But he was opposed to taking over the land by force, and indeed he wrote that such a war would violate the Three Oaths. From I Will Await Him, p. 250: Even Rabbi Avraham Yitzchok Kook, who…

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  • The Status Quo Agreement, and Why Agudah Didn’t Advocate Against a State

    A few years ago, the newspapers Hamodia (6/9/2021) and Yated Neeman (6/25/2021) published accounts of the “Status Quo” agreement reached between Agudath Israel and the Zionists in summer of 1947, in which the Zionist leadership made four promises relating to religion in the state they planned to found, in exchange for Agudah’s commitment not to…

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  • The Hebron Massacre: An Eyewitness Account

    The following is taken from the Hebrew Mishpacha Magazine, 8 Av 5769 (2009).  Rabbi Dov (Benny) Cohen was brought up in Seattle, Washington. In 1926, shortly after his thirteenth birthday, his parents sent him to study in the famous Slobodka Yeshiva of Lithuania, which had recently relocated in Hebron, Palestine. He witnessed the pogrom of…

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  • Carlson, Huckabee and the Solution to the Conflict

    During his recent interview with Tucker Carlson, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee struggled to define his beliefs about the Jewish people’s Biblical right to the land known today as Israel. Is it a religious right, an ethnic right, or is it based on the recognition of other nations? The Torah gives us the answer…

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  • Claim: The oaths lasted only for a thousand years

    Rabbi Ovadiah Hedaya (Shailos Uteshuvos Yaskil Avdi, v. 5, second introduction, paragraph 3, published in 1958) argues that the state was permitted based on Rabbi Chaim Vital’s statement in his introduction to Etz Chaim, that the oath only applied for one thousand years from the destruction of the Temple. The Satmar Rebbe (Vayoel Moshe 70-72)…

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  • Rabbi Yosef Tzvi Dushinsky

    STATEMENT BY THE COUNCIL OF THE ASHKENASIC JEWISH COMMUNITY JERUSALEM Presented to UNITED NATIONS SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON PALESTINE Jerusalem July 1947 – 1 – The Orthodox Jewish Community of Jerusalem which is organised as the Vaad Hair Ha-Ashkenasi ( Council of the Ashkenasic Jewish Community of Jerusalem) has the honour of extending its hearty and…

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  • The Chazon Ish

    The Chazon Ish said: Who in our time is considered a frumme apikoros (a religious heretic)? Anyone who claims that it is the fault of the rabbis that 6 million Jews were murdered in Europe, and anyone who celebrates Independence Day (Mishkenos Haro’im, p. 1197) The Zionist Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv, Rabbi Unterman, showed…

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  • Parshas Mishpatim

    This week we present a collection of Divrei Torah and stories on the subject of following the majority. Follow the majority opinion. (Shemos 23:2) At the Knessia Gedolah of Agudath Israel in Marienbad, 1937, the central topic of discussion was the recent proposal of England’s Peel Commission to partition Palestine, designating a piece for a…

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  • Rabbi Avraham Kalmanovitz

    The belief in the coming of moshiach is one of the thirteen principles in which every Jew must believe: to look forward to and wait for that great time when he will come. Therefore, one should not be in doubt about this even for a moment, but rather he must believe clearly that the word…

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  • Rabbi Aharon Kotler

    In the summer of 1937, the third convention (knessiah) of Agudath Israel was held in Marienbad. It was attended by hundreds of rabbis, heads of yeshivas and grand rabbis of Chassidic communities from a number of countries. Rabbi Aharon Kotler attended this convention. The central topic of discussion was the recent proposal of Britain’s Peel…

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