(Jerusalem) Rabbi Chaim Drukman, spiritual leader of religious Zionism in Israel, died Sunday evening of complications from COVID-19 at the age of 90, Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem announced.
Mentor of MK Betzalel Smotrich, who is to be appointed finance minister in Benyamin Netanyahu’s next government, Rabbi Drukman was for decades the most important religious figure in the Zionist religious current, which represents about 12% of the Israeli Jewish population. .
“The Jewish people are losing one of the spiritual giants of his 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,” Smotrich said in a statement. .
Israeli Prime Minister-designate Benyamin Netanyahu offered his condolences to the family, assuring that “the State of Israel has lost a great spiritual leader, and I have lost a personal friend whom I greatly esteemed”.
Born in 1932 in Poland, he escaped deportation during the Second World War and immigrated to Palestine in 1944 under 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, 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, led 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.