The national-religious camp’s flagship yeshiva

March 9, 2008 7:45 am henrymunsonjr National Religious (Religious Zionists), Israeli Religious Right

The national-religious camp’s flagship yeshiva - Haaretz, March 8, 2008

The Mercaz Harav rabbinic college is the most prominent yeshiva in the religious Zionist world. It trained the movement’s leading rabbis as well as many yeshiva heads, city rabbis, and teachers in religious colleges and high schools.

The school was central in shaping the evolution of religious Zionism. As the flagship of national-religious yeshivas, the religious right is bound to attribute greater symbolic meaning to a terrorist attack here than anywhere else.
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Founded in 1924 by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, then chief Ashkenazi rabbi during the British Mandate, it is seen as the first yeshiva to be Zionist in spirit.

Rabbi Kook called it “the central world yeshiva,” wishing to set it as a model for a new yeshiva concept, integrating traditional Talmud studies with Jewish philosophy, Bible and even Jewish history, geography and literature. The last three subjects were never actually taught there.

After its founder’s death in 1935 it was named Merkaz Harav after him, and became synonymous with Rabbi Kook’s teachings.

In its first decades the college had few students and at times it was not clear whether it would survive. The turning point came in the ’50s, when graduates of Bnei Akiva religious schools and high-school yeshivas seeking higher religious education flocked to Merkaz Harav, the only Zionist yeshiva.

The prominent Bnei Akiva rabbi Moshe Zvi Neria, a student of Rabbi Kook’s, encouraged students to go to Merkaz Harav, which was headed from 1952 by Rabbi Abraham Kook’s son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, until his death in 1982.

The foundations for the religious settlements in the West Bank were forged in Merkaz Harav, whose student Hanan Porat set out to restore the Jewish settlement in Gush Etzion immediately after the Six-Day War.

The founders of Gush Emunim, a religious political movement that encouraged Jewish settlement of land they believe God promised the Jews, came from Merkaz Harav after the Yom Kippur War.

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