Tag Archives: Knesset

Jew of the Week: Rabbi Yehuda Glick

Yehuda Glick (Credit: Amitay Salomon)

Yehuda Joshua Glick (b. 1965) was born in Brooklyn to an Orthodox Jewish family which made aliyah to Israel when he was nine years old. After completing his rabbinical studies, Glick began working for the Israeli Ministry of Immigrant Absorption. In 2005, after some ten years, he quit the job to protest Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. He then served as executive director of The Temple Institute, an organization working to rebuild the Holy Temple in Jerusalem through peaceful means. Glick is most famous for his activism with regards to permitting Jews to ascend the Temple Mount. This area is the holiest site in the world for the Jewish people, yet entrance to it is severely limited for Jews, and prayer there is currently forbidden to all but Muslims. As chairman of the Temple Mount Heritage Foundation and leader of the HaLiba group, Glick has worked tirelessly to end this racist policy, and to open the Temple Mount for visitation and prayer to people of all faiths. He envisions rebuilding a temple – “a house of prayer for all nations” – next to the Dome of the Rock. For leading prayer groups to the Temple Mount, Glick has been arrested multiple times. In 2013, he went on a hunger strike to protest a ban that forbid him to go to the Temple Mount. After twelve days without food, Glick was permitted to return to the Mount. In 2014, after giving a speech at a Jerusalem conference, an Arab man approached Glick and shot him four times in the chest before driving off on a motorcycle. Glick underwent multiple surgeries, and was unable to communicate or breathe on his own for a couple of weeks. Amazingly, he survived the assassination attempt. Shortly after, he joined the Likud political party, and was placed 33rd on its list. The party won 30 seats, making Glick third in line to become a parliamentarian. Over the past year, three Likud MKs resigned, including Moshe Ya’alon earlier this month. This opened the door for Glick to enter Knesset, which he did two days ago. His calls for peace, prayer, and human rights are truly universal, as he has stood by not only Orthodox Jews, but also Christian groups and Reform Jews (including the Women of the Wall) who aim to pray freely at Jerusalem’s holy sites. He has also spoken frequently about ending the plight of the Palestinians, and bridging gaps between Jews and Muslims. In addition to his own six kids, Glick is the legal guardian of six more children, and two foster children. He has been compared to Gandhi, and described as “earthly, wise, thoughtful, nonviolent, and compassionate.” Last year, he was awarded the Moskowitz Prize for Zionism by the Jewish National Fund.

Words of the Week

If your dreams don’t scare you, they are not big enough.
– Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

Jew of the Week: Mazor Bahaina

Rabbi and Member of Knesset

Mazor Bahaina (Credit: Knesset.gov.il)

Mazor Mahoy Bahaina (b. 1973) was born in the Ethiopian village of Welkite. As a child, he fled the country with his family on foot, heading for Israel. It took a year and a half, most of which was spent in Sudanese refugee camps, to finally reach the Promised Land. Bahaina enrolled in religious yeshivas for study, eventually making it to the prestigious Porat Yosef Yeshiva in Jerusalem. After earning his rabbinic ordination, he moved to Be’er Sheva to support the influx of Ethiopian Jewish immigrants, ultimately becoming the chief rabbi of the city’s 10,000 Ethiopian Jews. He also sat on the city’s council, which brought him into the political sphere. Bahaina eventually got on the list of Shas (“Shomrei Sefarad”, Israel’s religious Sephardic political party). He worked for the Ministry of Religious Affairs, and as an advisor to Israel’s Minister of Finance. In April 2008, Bahaina was given a seat in the Knesset, and served as a member of parliament until the following year. He was a member of the Labor, Welfare, and Health Committee, as well as the committee for children’s rights, among others. Though no longer in government, Bahaina continues to diligently serve Israel’s public, particularly the Ethiopian community, and is working to assist the remaining Jews of Ethiopia to make aliyah.

Words of the Week

Six million of us were murdered in the Holocaust. But instead of disappearing, we decided that after 2,000 years of exile, it would be better to go home and rebuild our own country. And so we did. What took other nations hundreds and hundreds of years to build, we did in only a few. What was possible we did very quickly, and what was impossible took us just a bit longer.
– Rabbi Dr. Nathan Lopes Cardozo

Jew of the Week: Meir Kahane

Meir Kahane

Meir David Kahane (1932-1990) was born in Brooklyn to an Orthodox Ashkenazi family. From a very young age, he was involved with Zionism, and was arrested as a fifteen year old for throwing eggs at the British Foreign Secretary who restricted Jewish immigration to Israel. At 22, he was the director of the New York division of Bnei Akiva – the largest religious Zionist youth organization in the world. Highly educated, Kahane received his rabbinic ordination from the Mir Yeshiva, followed by a political science degree, then a law degree, and a Master’s in international studies. In the late 1950s and 60s he served as a rabbi of a synagogue in Queens. After angering parents because he made their children more religiously observant, he was let go of his post, and took to writing. He went on to write many articles under various pseudonyms, such as David Sinai and Martin Keene, as well as a number of books, and was also the editor of The Jewish Press. Meanwhile, Kahane took a hard-line anti-communist stance, and began to infiltrate left-wing groups as a secular man named Michael King. He even shaved his beard to play the part. This earned him a role with the FBI, for which he worked for several years. Ironically, in 1968 Kahane founded an organization which was listed as a terrorist group by the FBI: the Jewish Defense League (JDL). This group was formed with the goal of protecting Jews from antisemitism (coining the term “Never Again”), while also assisting the plight of Soviet Jewry. On the one hand, it was praised for changing the stereotypical image of Jews as “weak and vulnerable”, and for protecting Jews from assault, particularly the young and elderly. On the other hand, it was heavily criticized for its violent tactics. Kahane himself was arrested on a number of occasions, and served a short prison term. In 1971 he made aliyah to Israel, where he continued his work, being arrested over sixty times in the Holy Land. He served a prison sentence there, too, for planning revenge attacks against Palestinians that killed Jewish settlers. Kahane soon founded the Kach political party. After many years of unsuccessful campaigns, he finally won a Knesset seat in the 1984 elections. However, many of Kahane’s speeches in parliament were boycotted. Despite projections that he would win many more seats in the 1988 elections, the government banned his party for being racist. Kahane opened a yeshiva where he taught for the last few years of his life. In 1990, after giving a speech in New York, Kahane was assassinated by an Egyptian-American terrorist. The terrorist was acquitted of the murder, but later charged for being involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombings and sent to jail for life. Kahane was buried in Jerusalem, and 150,000 came to the funeral, making it among the largest in Israel’s history. Kahane was an extremely controversial figure. He has been accused, convicted, and suspected of just about everything from adultery to sedition and terrorism. At the same time, he was also described as a “nice, patient teacher”, and by Bob Dylan as “a really sincere guy”. Kahane was driven by witnessing the cruel injustices suffered by Jews, and seeing time after time how Israel was never treated fairly or equally by the international community. One of his best-known sayings was: “It is better to have an Israel that everyone hates, than an Auschwitz that everyone loves.” Yesterday was his yahrzeit.

Words of the Week

Quotes from Meir Kahane:

“The question is as follows: if the Arabs settle among us and make enough children to become a majority, will Israel continue to be a Jewish state?”

“I don’t think that we can sit back and watch Arabs throwing rocks at buses whenever they feel like it. They must understand that a bomb thrown at a Jewish bus is going to mean a bomb thrown at an Arab bus.”

“The Jew is upset because the nations of the world – the United Nations – lash him, brand him as racist and evil, hate him and openly demonstrate their desire to destroy him.”

“For so long as the Jew has even one ally, he will be convinced – in his smallness of mind – that his salvation came from that ally. It is only when he is alone – against all of his own efforts and frantic attempts – that he will, through no choice, be compelled to turn to God.”