Rabbi Urges Disengagement of Religious Activities from Partisan Politics

Dr. Immanuel Jakobovits, the Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth, has urged the Israeli Chief Rabbinate to press for religious instruction and practices in all schools in the country in return for a moratorium on religious legislation during the present emergency. Speaking to ministers and leaders of the United Synagogue, Rabbi Jakobovits said he made his suggestion during a recent meeting in Jerusalem. He said the present agitation was “divisive and counter-productive” and advocated a gradual disengagement of religious activities from partisan politics.

The Chief Rabbi said that all rabbinical authorities agreed that Jews had, no right to surrender our claim to the entire Holy land within the present historic borders. “But what is questionable is whether we should assert it at the risk of thousands of lives,” he added. He stressed that the judgement on what provides the optimum security for Israel had to be left to the military and political experts, and was not a matter for rabbis to decide. Jerusalem was, however, in a unique category.

Rabbi Jakobovits noted that the Yom Kippur War had “shattered the illusions of the earliest secular Jewish nationalists, and their successors who believed that a Jewish state would solve the Jewish problem by making Jews an equal among the nations. We are now the loneliest people on earth, subjected to the very double-standard of treatment it was the secularists’ dream to eliminate. We must accept our uniqueness and never be turned into a nation like all others. Without our distinctiveness as religious pioneers, Jewish survival would be meaningless and questionable.”