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Rabbi Chaim Druckman, giant of Israeli settlement and Religious Zionist movements, dies at 90
(JTA) — Rabbi Chaim Druckman, whose mission was to unite the people of Israel, was father to a movement now poised to sow some of its deepest divisions in decades.
Druckman, who died Sunday at 90 after contracting COVID-19, was a giant in the religious Zionism movement, which sought to integrate the two preeminent philosophies that saw themselves as bulwarks against Jewish disintegration: Orthodox Judaism and Zionism.
In the 1950s, he established the hesder movement, which blended Torah study with military service. For tens of thousands of religious Jews, his innovation resolved a dilemma that had beset Israel’s founders: What was the most meaningful way for young Orthodox men to spend their first years of adulthood?
“We study Torah to fulfill our national obligation and serve in the army to fulfill our religious obligation,” Druckman often said.
Over the years, he led yeshivas and youth movements to extend that vision, and in 2012, he won the Israel Prize, Israel’s national award, for his lifetime of contributions to religious Zionist education.
Yet as much as he sought to bridge divides, he was as frequently positioned at their fault lines, in recent years disparaging non-Orthodox Jews and mentoring extremists who seek the marginalization of non-Jewish and non-Orthodox minorities in Israel. He also at least twice defended and sought to rehabilitate religious leaders convicted of sexual abuse, including of children.
Druckman was born in 1932 in Kuty, in what was then Poland and what is now Ukraine. He and his parents went into hiding during the Holocaust and then fled to the Soviet Union. He entered British Mandate Palestine in 1944 posing as the child of another couple and was reunited with his parents after the war.
He soon became a disciple of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, the rabbi who helped shape the nationalist outlook of the National Religious Party. Kook’s teachings drove Druckman to become one of the first leaders of the religious Zionist movement to embrace the settlement of lands captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. He was at the seminal 1968 Passover seder in Hebron that is widely seen as the launch of the religious settlement movement and is believed to have coined the name of its principal body, Gush Emunim, which means bloc of believers.
Druckman became a figurehead of the settlement movement, although he lived most of his life in Mercaz Shapira, the Israeli village near Ashkelon where he ran the influential Or Etzion Yeshiva. He served in the Knesset in coalitions led by Likud and Labor prime ministers, from 1977 to 1988 and then from 1999 to 2003, with short periods in the opposition.
In the wake of the massive influx immigrants after the fall of the Soviet Union, Druckman as a senior religious court judge led an effort to ease conversion to Orthodox Judaism. His suasions backfired, leading haredi Orthodox judges to seek the nullification of thousands of conversions he had supervised.
However much he preached reconciliation among Jews, he stood hard and fast against any attempt to dismantle settlements, going so far as to advise soldiers to refuse orders to take part in the removal of settlements. He also stood by Jews accused and convicted of violent crimes associated with tensions over the settlements, including murder and terrorism, raising funds for those accused and welcoming them back into society.
He also stood by people who were accused of sexual abuse multiple times. He was rebuked in 1999 for failing to report credible reports of sexual assault by a yeshiva head he supervised, Zev Kopilevich, and he later championed another rabbi convicted of sexual abuse, Moti Elon. While he conceded in 2013 that the government was right to rebuke him, he also dismissed as “gossip” just this month multiple allegations of rape against another yeshiva head, Zvi Tau.
Until recently, Druckman championed Naftali Bennett and his Jewish Home Party as the natural heir to the National Religious Party tradition — but in 2021 when Bennett chose the path of reconciliation once championed by Druckman, joining a unity government with secular parties, Druckman cut him off and instead embraced the extremist Religious Zionist Party led by Bezalel Smotrich.
Druckman played a role in brokering the entry of the Religious Zionist Party into the government that Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to bring to power in coming days. The entry of Smotrich and a colleague, Itamar Ben-Gvir, into the government is likely to precipitate a crisis with Diaspora Jewry. They favor restricting Israeli laws to favor the Orthodox, annexing the West Bank and loosening laws that restrict troops from killing or physically harming Palestinians.
At Druckman’s funeral on Monday, Smotrich said Druckman “reproached” him frequently for his excesses, but in a recent interview with Yisrael Hayom, the nationalist daily, Druckman made clear that many of the ideas Smotrich champions had his blessing, including his proposal for a state based on religious law and his plans for anti-LGBTQ discrimination.
Tens of thousands of people attended Druckman’s funeral Monday in his home village of Mercaz Shapira. Israel’s leaders at his funeral remembered him as a unifier.
“All of us were your sons, all of us were your students,” President Isaac Herzog said, according to the Times of Israel.
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Iran Celebrates Anniversary of US Embassy Takeover With Chants of ‘Death to America,’ ‘Death to Israel’
Iranians take to the streets during nationwide rallies on Nov. 4, 2025, marking the anniversary of the 1979 takeover of the US embassy by waving flags and chanting “death to America” and “death to Israel.” Photo: Screenshot
Nearly half a century after Iranian students stormed and took over the US embassy in Tehran, the Islamic Republic of Iran continues to mark the anniversary with rallies across the capital and hundreds of cities nationwide, celebrating what officials describe as their “resistance against the West.”
On Tuesday, thousands of Iranians took part in demonstrations commemorating the 46th anniversary of the US embassy takeover in 1979.
Framed as a show of “national unity,” participants condemned “US and Israeli aggressions” against the Islamist regime — including the 12-day war with Israel in June, which Washington joined by targeting key Iranian nuclear sites after multiple rounds of negotiations failed to yield any results.
During the demonstrations, people were seen waving Iranian flags and holding posters of those killed in US and Israeli attacks, while chanting slogans including “death to America” and “death to Israel.”
Iran celebrates victory over Western imperialism
Hundreds of thousands took to the streets of Tehran and 900+ cities nationwide to mark the 46th anniversary of the 1979 US Embassy takeover
The 1979 revolution ended both Western and Israeli influence in Iran by deposing… pic.twitter.com/UB03SanUFU
— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) November 4, 2025
Every year, the Iranian regime marks Nov. 4 as the “National Day of Fight Against Global Arrogance,” commemorating the 1979 takeover of the US embassy in Tehran by radical students — followers of the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
For 444 days, 52 US embassy staff members were held hostage, subjected to abuse, torture, and mock executions.
On November 4, 1979, followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran; the Iranians held more than 50 Americans hostage for 444 days. Listen to former American hostages tell their story. pic.twitter.com/gaO6tojGzt
— Department of State (@StateDept) November 4, 2020
According to Iranian state media, government officials praised Tuesday’s events as a tribute to the students and youth who led the “revolution,” portraying them as a key symbol of “the Islamic Republic’s opposition to global hegemony.”
They also reaffirmed Iran’s commitment to resisting “US and Israeli dominance,” supporting global movements against “foreign hegemony” and defending Palestinian rights.
During a speech in the legislature, Iranian Deputy Parliament Speaker Ali Nikzad described the US embassy takeover as a reflection “of years of oppression and humiliation inflicted on the Iranian people.”
“Today marks the anniversary of the revolutionary action of students in taking over the Den of Espionage,” Nikzad said, using the regime’s name for the former US embassy compound.
He also said the differences between Washington and Tehran are deep-rooted, fundamental, and cannot be resolved through negotiations — rejecting renewed calls for Iran to resume talks with Western powers over its nuclear program.
Across the country, demonstrators denounced the US and Israel with speeches and religious chants, while symbolic displays of Iranian missiles and centrifuges to enrich uranium for nuclear fuel were showcased along the parade routes.
There were also exhibitions showcasing decades of “Western and Israeli crimes,” along with the burning of US and Israeli flags and a symbolic trial of US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In a statement, Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a military force and internationally designated terrorist organization, condemned recent US behavior toward the country, saying it “demonstrated that the pattern of intervention, pressure, deception, and threats remains a persistent strategy against the Iranian nation and its independent political establishment.”
“The National Student Day is a reminder of the criminal nature of the United States, showing that faithful and revolutionary Iranian people will never surrender to domination and deception by global arrogance,” the IRGC continued.
“The takeover of the Den of Espionage embodies a strategic choice between the path of resistance, dignity, and independence versus that of compromise, submission, and surrender,” the IRGC stated.
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Arizona man sentenced to 4 years in prison for antisemitic threats to Jewish NYC hotel owner
An Arizona man who sent hundreds of threatening messages to a Jewish-owned hotel in New York City was sentenced to 49 months in prison on Thursday in federal court.
Donovan Hall, 35, of Mesa, Arizona, pleaded guilty to making interstate threats and interstate stalking of the Jewish owners of the Historic Blue Moon Hotel in Manhattan. He was also sentenced to three years of supervised release.
The Blue Moon Hotel is “dedicated to Jewish community in every way that we can be,” Randy Settenbrino said in an interview last year from his hotel, which includes rooms named for icons of the Jewish Lower East Side, a kosher cafe and a mural depicting 2,000 years of Jewish history.
At the time, Settenbrino and his employees had just begun to get what prosecutors said were nearly 1,000 threatening messages from Hall. Sent between August and November 2024, the messages threatened to “torture, mutilate, rape, and murder them and their families,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
In October, Hall texted photographs of two firearms and a machete to one of his victims, writing, “I’ve got something for you and your inbred children” and “for the Zionist cowards,” according to his federal indictment.
Threatening text messages of firearms sent to the owner of the Blue Moon Hotel by Donovan Hall. (Courtesy Randy Settenbrino)
“Donovan Hall targeted Jewish victims with a sustained campaign of intimidation, terror, and harassment,” said U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton in a statement. “The approximately 1,000 threats he sent to these New Yorkers were alarming and brazen.”
Hall’s messages coincided with a boycott campaign against the hotel launched after Settenbrino’s son, an Israeli soldier, was identified as having posted videos of shooting at destroyed buildings and detonating bombs in homes and a mosque in Gaza.
Hall, who has been held at New York’s Metropolitan Detention Center since his arrest last year, apologized for his actions in a sentencing submission to the court, writing that he “wanted to champion for a cause and hunt down the bullies, not realizing that it was me the whole time.”
In an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency after Hall’s sentencing, Settenbrino said “baby killer” had been spray painted on the windows of his hotel, and flyers were posted around Manhattan calling for its boycott and referring to his son, Bram, as a “war criminal.”
“We’re sitting at a pivotal time in New York City, where we’re feeling the encroachment of hate and antisemitism in the West, like our brethren are feeling it in Europe, and so it’s very scary for everyone concerned,” said Settenbrino. “It’s very important that there are strong sentences handed out to this, not just for us, but for klal yisrael [the Jewish people] in general.”
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US Proposes International Gaza Force to UN as Turkey Pushes for Role Amid Concerns Over Hamas Support
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan poses with his counterparts Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al-Saud of Saudi Arabia, Ayman Safadi of Jordan, and Sugiono of Indonesia before their meeting on Gaza, in Istanbul, Turkey, Nov. 3, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Murad Sezer
The United States has proposed a draft resolution for an international force in Gaza as Turkey seeks a role in post-war reconstruction, raising concerns that Ankara’s growing influence in the enclave could strengthen Hamas.
On Monday, Washington sent a draft resolution to members of the United Nations Security Council, proposing the creation of an International Stabilization Force (ISF) in Gaza that would remain for at least two years, according to several media reports.
Under US President Donald Trump’s peace plan, such a force will oversee the Gaza ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and train local security forces.
Based on the proposed draft resolution, participating countries in the international force would be granted a broad mandate to maintain security and administer the war-torn enclave through the end of 2027, with the possibility of extending the mission. Troop deployments are expected to begin as early as January.
In recent weeks, Washington has been working closely with regional powers to determine the composition of the peacekeeping force, with Turkey seeking to play a central role in the enclave.
However, Israel has repeatedly opposed any involvement of Turkish security forces in post-war Gaza.
Experts have warned that Turkey, a key backer of Hamas, could shield the Islamist group in Gaza or even strengthen its terrorist infrastructure as it seeks a central role in post-war efforts.
According to the draft resolution, the ISF would include troops from multiple participating countries and would be responsible for securing Gaza’s borders with Israel and Egypt, while also protecting civilians and maintaining humanitarian corridors.
The ISF would also “stabilize the security environment in Gaza by ensuring the process of demilitarizing the [enclave], including the destruction and prevention of rebuilding of military, terror, and offensive infrastructure, as well as the permanent decommissioning of weapons from non-state armed groups,” the draft states.
Under this plan, the international force would seemingly take on the responsibility of disarming Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that violently seized total control of Gaza in 2007 after being elected to power in parliamentary elections the prior year.
As Turkey aims to secure a role in post-war Gaza, the country has been leading efforts, along with six other regional powers, to establish a Palestinian-led self-rule in the enclave after the war.
This week, the foreign ministers of the so-called “guarantor countries” under Trump’s peace plan — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Pakistan, and Indonesia — met in Istanbul to discuss Gaza’s future and potential steps following the ceasefire.
At the summit, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan called on Muslim nations to wield their influence in shaping Gaza’s reconstruction and future governance.
“Our principle is that Palestinians should govern the Palestinians and ensure their own security,” Fidan said during a press conference. “The international community should support this in the best possible way — diplomatically, institutionally, and economically.”
“Nobody wants to see a new system of tutelage emerge,” the top Turkish diplomat continued. “We’ve now reached an extremely critical stage: We do not want the genocide in Gaza to resume.”
On Saturday, Fidan met with Hamas senior negotiator Khalil al-Hayya and several key members of the group’s political leadership to discuss the current ceasefire and ongoing diplomatic efforts.
Shortly after the meeting, the Turkish diplomat asserted that the Palestinian terrorist group was “ready to hand over Gaza to a committee of Palestinians.”
Hamas has consistently rejected disarmament, insisting on keeping its weapons and controlling security in Gaza during an interim period.
Under phase one of Trump’s ceasefire plan, the Israeli military controls 53 percent of Gaza’s territory. Hamas, meanwhile, controls the other 47 percent, where the vast majority of the Gazan population is located.
Since the ceasefire went into effect, Hamas terrorists have brutally cracked down on all rivals and dissenters, with videos emerging of rampant torture and public executions in the streets. The Algemeiner reported last week that four Israel-backed militias fighting Hamas are moving to fill the power vacuum, pledging to cooperate with most international forces involved in rebuilding the enclave but vowing to resist any presence from Qatar, Turkey, or Iran — all three of which have supported Hamas for years.
At the Istanbul summit, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has maintained an openly hostile stance toward the Jewish state, reiterated that Hamas was “determined to adhere to the [ceasefire] agreement” and called on Muslim states to play “a leading role” in Gaza’s recovery.
According to Trump’s peace plan, Gaza would be governed by a “technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee” after the war, with the supervision of an international body called the “Board of Peace.”
Under the proposed framework, the ISF is designed to maintain security in Gaza during this transition period, as Israel gradually withdraws from additional areas of the enclave.
While the plan specifies that Hamas would be excluded from post-war governance, the Palestinian Authority (PA) could potentially take control of Gaza after undergoing internal reforms.
The PA, which has long been riddled with accusations of corruption, has maintained for years a so-called “pay-for-slay” program, which rewards terrorists and their families for carrying out attacks against Israelis.
Israel has rejected any role for Hamas or the PA in governing Gaza after the war.