How the Israel-Hamas war exposed a rift in Haredi Orthodox Judaism
אַ גרופּע באַטייליקטע אינעם מאַרש אין וואַשינגטאָן, דעם 14טן נאָוועמבער 2023. Photo by Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
By Louis Keene December 7, 2023
When the question about the rally finally came, Rabbi Ahron Lopiansky chuckled. “I had a hunch that that might come up, for some reason,” he said.
Lopiansky, the head of the Yeshiva of Greater Washington, was seated on a panel this weekend at the annual convention held by Agudath Israel of America, the leading national organization for Haredi Orthodox Jews.
It’s been nearly three weeks since tens of thousands of American Jews descended upon Washington for the March for Israel, but in parts of the Haredi world, they’re still talking about it — and questioning the instructions given by several Agudath Israel-affiliated rabbinic leaders to skip it.
The rabbis left no room for interpretation — one yeshiva head said that “going to Washington is treif like chazzer,” or nonkosher like pig — and one in particular left it late, announcing the morning of the rally that he was withdrawing his support.
What influence the various statements had on Haredi turnout is unclear. But they rankled many in the Haredi world who saw joining the demonstration as a no-brainer to ensure the safety of fellow Jews — and opposition as a betrayal. An anonymous letter to Agudath Israel leadership, shared on Haredi blogs in the weeks since, called the council out of touch and said it should be overhauled. One prominent Haredi publication described the fallout as a “massive controversy.”
The idea that some Haredi Jews would reject a rally organized to show support for Israel and to counter rising antisemitism may surprise those unfamiliar with the community, a small but fast-growing sector of American Jewry. The Haredi world’s disregard for Zionism originates in its opposition to the movement’s secular orientation and the belief that Jewish nationhood could only be achieved through the Messiah. But the debate over the rally exposed a split some observers say has widened since Oct. 7, between some Haredi leaders who maintain traditional non-Zionist attitudes and a constituency whose decadeslong pro-Israel shift crystallized following the attack.
Several Haredi Jews who were willing to be interviewed for this story declined to go on the record, citing the sensitivity of the subject in the Orthodox community. But much of the discourse on the topic has been public: in speeches posted online, open letters, on message boards, and in Haredi media.
In one circulating audio recording, an instructor at a Haredi yeshiva in Jerusalem, Rabbi Berel Whitman, attacked opposition to the rally, saying it “is making an enormous portion of the frum world say, ‘Oh my God, if this is what the rabbis say, they’re so out of touch, I want nothing to do with it.’”
The Haredi hangup on secular Zionism
In the 75 years since Israel’s founding — and especially in the 21st century — many Haredi Jews’ stance toward Israel has softened. Sources offered a few reasons for the change, including new strains of Haredi thought, increasing assimilation into modern society, and the connections many have to Israel through family or personal experience. Concern that secular Zionism threatens religious Judaism has also diminished over time as religious Jews have gained a foothold in Israeli society.
“A lot of the fears of the initial Haredi world in the ’40s and ’50s of what the secular state may foreshadow for Orthodox Judaism has not only not played out, it’s just in the opposite reality,” said Rabbi Ron Yitzchok Eisenman, who has led a Haredi synagogue in Passaic, New Jersey, for nearly three decades. “The Israeli government is the largest supporter of Haredi Jewry in the world right now.”
The March for Israel inadvertently tested the limits of that change of heart. Many Haredi Jews understood it as a necessary political action — supporting Biden to ward off momentum toward a demand for cease-fire. But the program did not include any Orthodox rabbis (or any rabbis at all for that matter) among its speakers, and it was overtly Zionist.
The range of Haredi advisories reflected differing tolerance levels — even within Agudath Israel leadership. A Nov. 13 community notice signed by five of the 13 members of the organization’s rabbinic council, Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah, discouraged going because “the main speakers are a mixture of people whose entire essence is the opposite of Torah and yirah (God-fearingness) and tznius (modesty).” (Dozens spoke or performed at the rally, including politicians, celebrities and the families of hostages held by Hamas.)
But that message did not contain the organization’s imprimatur, and Agudath Israel’s formal statement took a more open stance. It stopped short of encouraging people to attend but said that it was “important, midarchei hashtadlonus [for purposes of influence], that there be a large turnout at this event.”
Meanwhile, mainstream Orthodox institutions were descending on D.C. en masse. Yeshiva University, which is to the religious left of Haredi orthodoxy, canceled classes for the day. Synagogues and high schools up and down the Eastern Seaboard sent delegations. And some Hasidic bodies, like the Lubavitch-serving Crown Heights Beis Din and the Boro Park Jewish Community Council, threw their support behind the rally.
It was against this current of sentiment that Rabbi Aharon Feldman — the head of Ner Israel Rabbinical College in Baltimore, who had originally backed the rally — withdrew his support after the full program was announced. He eventually provided two reasons for the decision: the program’s inclusion of Christian nationalist Pastor John Hagee, which he called “the first step to interfaith acceptance,” and the rally’s grounding in secular Zionism, which he called “a rejection of the Jewish faith.”
“It supplants God and Torah as the basis of the Jewish people, for which it substitutes a common land and language,” Feldman wrote Nov. 20. “There can be no greater evidence of this than the anthem Hatikvah, which states that the hope of Jews for two millennia has been ‘to be a free nation in our land’ — not a nation of God and Torah. This anthem was scheduled to begin the program.”
But many Haredi Jews made the trip anyway, among them Eisenman, who has three sons who served in the IDF.
The backlash
Frustration with Haredi leadership smoldering in the days after the rally came to a head with the publication of an open letter to Agudath Israel that was spread on WhatsApp and Haredi blogs.
“There is a terrible divide between the ideology of the voice coming out of Agudah and the people who are its loyal adherents,” wrote the the letter’s anonymous author, who claims to be an Agudath Israel constituent, adding, “If you want to continue to be the voice for what is still the mainstream ultra-Orthodox in the country, it is time that real change comes to your institution.”
The anonymous letter had its critics, who said its suggestions to appoint Modern Orthodox and Chabad rabbis to the Moetzes were unreasonable. That an actual Agudath Israel constituent would suggest those additions, they said, was implausible.
But Haredi rabbis in the movement’s rank-and-file echoed its main points. Whitman, the Mir Yeshiva rabbi, said he had been “bombarded day and night” with people upset about the rally communiques.
He said the Moetzes rabbis’ obsession with the boogeymen of secular Zionism and Christian Zionism were missing the point of the rally — to stave off calls for a cease-fire by demonstrating support for President Biden in as great of numbers as the American Jewish community could summon. Even the Moetzes rabbis agreed the rally was pikuach nefesh, or life-saving, Whitman said, and opposing it in spite of that undermined their authority as religious leaders.
“The frum community doesn’t show up at a rally which is pikuach nefesh to save people murdered by terrorism?” Whitman said. “This is what it expresses: that Haredi society sadly, tragically, always finds a reason to say no.”
A ‘reassessment’
The discontent over the rally in the U.S. matched a shift occurring in Israel, where for the first time in the nation’s history, thousands of Haredi men are enlisting in the IDF.
Experts have said that the enlistment trend is unlikely to last. But Eisenman believed it speaks to a solidifying understanding among Haredi Jews that their stake in the nation can translate into more direct involvement in its welfare.
“The movement is towards — for lack of a better term — a reassessment,” Eisenman said. “A reassessment of the old positions of total isolation and insularity.”
Eisenman wrote a lengthy post about his decision to attend the rally on Matzav, a Haredi blog. He says that he received scores of complimentary emails from Haredi Jews after its publication.
Since Oct. 7, his synagogue, Congregation Ahavas Israel, is one of many that have added “Acheinu,” a Jewish solidarity standard, to the prayer service.
“There’s a vulnerability that galvanized a lot of people,” he said, “to recognize that we’re in this together and ultimately as Israel goes, so probably we all go.”
Lopiansky, the Washington yeshiva rabbi who fielded the question about the rally, had prepared: He pulled from his jacket pocket a piece of paper containing an excerpt from the Talmud. In the passage, a student finds two groups examining the same case reaching opposite conclusions. But there aren’t two Torahs, the Talmud teaches, but one containing the entire spectrum of opinions.
Likewise, he said, Agudath Israel was originally composed of several strains of Orthodox thought: Lithuanian, Hungarian, Polish and German, and they only achieved unification by preserving a decentralized system.
“There’s a mistake as if Agudah, as if Moetzes Gedolei Hatorah, is” always of one mind, Lopiansky said. “There will always be disagreements, but the differences in opinion are legitimate.”
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