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Rabbi Gershon Edelstein, revered haredi leader in Israel, dies at 100
(JTA) — Hundreds of thousands of mourners crowded into Bnei Brak Tuesday for the funeral of Rabbi Gershon Edelstein, head of the Lithuanian Ponevezh Yeshiva and one of the most influential religious leaders in Israel.
In addition to running the yeshiva, one of the most prestigious in the haredi Orthodox world, for more than two decades, Edelstein was the spiritual leader of Degel HaTorah, a faction of Israel’s United Torah Judaism political party that played a key role in the formation of the current government.
In the last year of his life, after the death of Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky at 94, Edelstein was awarded the title of “gadol hador,” or “greatest of the generation.” He had succeeded Kanievsky as the leader of Israel’s non-Hasidic haredi community, and his death is seen as leaving that community without a clear leader for the first time.
Edelstein was considered somewhat moderate for his approach toward interacting with the secular Israeli world while still remaining attuned to the needs of his devout community, where he was revered for his humane approach to teaching.
“Rabbi Edelstein was a spiritual leader of enormous stature whose greatness in Torah and devout greatness influenced our generation and will influence generations to come,” Israeli President Isaac Herzog said in a statement on Twitter. “This is a great loss to the yeshiva world and the entire nation of Israel.”
Thousands attend the funeral of Rabbi Gershon Edelstein, head of the Ponevezh Yeshiva, and spiritual leader of the Degel haTorah party in Israel, in Bnei Brak, Israel, May 30, 2023. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
Born to a family of rabbis near Smolensk in the Soviet Union, Edelstein and his father and brothers immigrated to pre-state Israel in 1934. Edelstein eventually settled in Bnei Brak, where in 1943, he became one of the first students of the Ponevezh Yeshiva when it was reestablished there after closing in Nazi-occupied Lithuania. He married Henya Rachel Diskin in 1947, the same year he took a top title at the yeshiva. In the 1990s, a disagreement between two leaders at the yeshiva led to a schism, and Edelstein became the top leader of one of the factions. (Both groups still meet in the same building.) He stayed in that role until his death, reportedly continuing to teach until this week despite having been hospitalized.
Edelstein advocated for Orthodox families to maintain ties with children who became secular, and attributed the non-observance of Jewish law by secular Jews to ignorance rather than the wickedness cited by more extremist haredi leaders. He also embraced Orthodox Israelis who chose to serve in the army, in an apparent rejection of the stance of some haredi leaders who characterize those who choose army service as rejecting Torah study.
Also unlike some other haredi leaders, Edelstein advocated caution during the COVID-19 pandemic. During the first round of High Holidays during the pandemic, Edelstein pushed for outdoor prayer quorums that maintained social distancing or indoor prayers in a well-ventilated area, both with congregants wearing masks. When the COVID-19 vaccines were produced, Edelstein also recommended that everyone 12 years and older get vaccinated.
He had a heavily regimented daily schedule, waking up at 5:30 a.m. to make it in time to pray morning services by 7 a.m., with a full day of teaching, learning and praying until midnight. According to a 2017 profile in Israel HaYom, he also adhered to the so-called “Rambam diet” (named for the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides) and ate vegetables, cheese and half a slice of whole-grain bread in the morning and in the evening. While he would eat a cooked lunch, the profile explained, he had not eaten sweets in 80 years.
From his perch at the top of the yeshiva, Edelstein also served as president of the Council of Yeshivas, an organization that supports yeshivas in Eastern Europe.
Israeli president Isaac Herzog (right, holding microphone) visits Rabbi Gershon Edelstein (left) in Bnei Brak in 2021. (Wikimedia)
In his capacity as a spiritual advisor of the Degel HaTorah party, Edelstein is most recently known for demanding that the Belz Hasidic sect drop an agreement with the education ministry to teach more secular studies in exchange for increased government funding. His success in pressing the group to drop the demand preserved the United Torah Judaism ticket of religious parties, allowing the bloc to help Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to form a government last year.
He also drew widespread attention in 2021 after the suicide of haredi children’s book author and alleged serial sexual abuser Chaim Walder, when Edelstein claimed that Walder’s victims who spoke up about his abuse were responsible for his death.
“It is clear that the great pressure he was under led him to lose his sanity and kill himself. This is called murder,” Edelstein said.
Edelstein’s wife Henya died in 2001. Among his survivors are sons who are rabbis in Israel, at least one of whom spoke at his funeral.
“Our father did not want to pressure us, or anyone else, into devoutness,” Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Edelstein said during a eulogy, according to Israeli media. “Make no mistake: He wanted us to be devout, but from within, not from without.”
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VIDEO: A Hasid gives us a tour of Morocco in Yiddish
דער ירושלימער יוטוב־שטערן וועלוול קירשנבוים האָט לעצטנס אַרויסגעשטעלט אַ ווידעאָ אויף ייִדיש פֿון אַ פּרעכטיקן וויזיט, וואָס ער האָט געמאַכט אין מאַראָקאָ. עס באַגלייט אים זײַן חבֿר אַבֿרהם פּרץ.
אינעם ווידעאָ זעט מען ווי קירשנבוים דאַוונט שחרית מיט די אָרטיקע ייִדן און באַזוכט אַ גוט אָפּגעהיטענעם בית־עולם, וווּ עס ליגן באַערדיקט גרויסע צדיקים ווי למשל הרבֿ חיים בן עתר (1696–1743), באַקאַנט ווי דער „אור החיים“. „מענטשן מיינען, אַז נאָר אין אייראָפּע זענען דאָ קבֿרים פֿון צדיקים!“ זאָגט קירשנבוים.
מיר זעען אַ גרויסע, שיינע שיל מיט אַ פֿײַנער אַרכיטעקטור אין קאַזאַבלאַנקאַ; דעם גרויסן אַראַבישן שוק, וווּ קירשנבוים קויפֿט זיך אײַן מלבושים פּונקט ווי די מאַראָקאַנער גייען אָנגעטאָן. ער באַוווּנדערט אויך די שיינע טיי־גלעזער און טשײַניקן, וואָס מע פֿאַרקויפֿט דאָרט, און באַקענט זיך מיט אַ ייִדישן סוחר וואָס האַנדלט מיט זילבער און גאָלד, פּונקט אַזוי ווי זײַן טאַטע און זיידע האָבן געטאָן פֿאַר דור־דורות.
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Conservative and Christian movies are coming for Hollywood
A star-studded new movie set in a Soviet prison is coming out in November. James Franco and Rob Lowe anchor the cast of Confession, playing a brutal prison guard and an imprisoned dissident professor, and a disheveled Nick Nolte appears as a fellow prisoner.
These actors were once huge gets, and their names could convey legitimacy to a project. Nolte and Franco both have received Academy Award nominations. Lowe was a member of the Brat Pack, and was a regular on The West Wing.
Confession, written by Ben Shapiro and produced by the rightwing tabloid-esque news site The Daily Wire, is not the expected fare for actors with that kind of name recognition; Shapiro’s screenwriting aspirations have been the target of ridicule for years.
Nevertheless, this isn’t the only Daily Wire production getting big names; Danny Trejo signed onto a pro-ICE movie about Minneapolis in the aftermath of the Renee Good shooting, and Jonathan Majors led Run, Fight, Hide: Infidels earlier this year.
Each one of these actors has been, in some way, canceled or in career doldrums so may have been more open to working with The Daily Wire. And some have claimed that they did not know who Shapiro was, or what his politics were; Trejo’s son, Gilbert, said his 82-year-old father did not endorse ICE and was misled about the movie before he signed his contract.
Movie studios have struggled through the pandemic and the streaming era, both of which have tanked box office receipts, leaving the field open for movies from offbeat production studios. In addition to The Daily Wire, there has been a whole ream of Christian movies attempting to shift the stereotype of bible movies — that they’re preachy, low-budget straight-to-TV affairs with cardboard acting — to something more prestigious, or at least profitable.
The Christian company Angel Studios has been placing screenings of the half philo-semitic, half-antisemitic Jesus TV series The Chosen in movie theaters across the country, produced the right-wing hit The Sound of Freedom and is pumping out faith-based movies like the animated King of Kings Christmas story and David, a kiddie movie about the biblical king. Recently, Pinnacle Peak Pictures, another faith-based production company, premiered Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, another bible movie that was notable enough to merit a review in The New York Times. (Though admittedly it wasn’t a particularly positive one.)
For decades, Hollywood, and the media industry at large, has been associated with liberalism, progressive politics and diversity. (This is part of why conservative conspiracy theorists often insist that Jews control the media.) Even when conservatives are in power, satirical movies have poked fun at the ruling class — Team America: World Police spoofed George W. Bush’s foreign policy, while M*A*S*H critiqued Richard Nixon. During the current Trump administration, we’ve seen One Battle After Another lambasting immigration policies and rising white nationalism, Eddington on misinformation and populism, and The Apprentice depicting Trump directly.
But a rising number of higher-budget, bigger releases from the right wing, whether The Daily Wire’s conservative political parables or the Christian fables, are bringing a new kind of messaging — about the importance of God and country, about gender roles, about about the centrality of Jesus to the U.S. — to the American movie-going public.
This is no accident. A group of powerful conservative Christians, many of whom worked on Project 2025, are proponents of the Seven Mountains Mandate, a blueprint for Christian nationalism that instructs Christians to gain influence and control over the “seven mountains” of society — which include media, entertainment and the arts. The Mandate is part of the New Apostolic Reformation, a decentralized evangelical movement embraced by millions of Americans.
Jeremy Boreing, the director of many Daily Wire movies — though he has since left the company — said on a podcast hosted by businessman Patrick Bet-David that “It had always been part of our strategy to move into making culture, not just criticizing culture” as a way of proving that “there is a future where conservatives aren’t losing. There’s a future where we have political power and cultural power.”
Cultural power, of course, requires more than just a lot of movies; they have to be well-done, or at least appear to be. Previous Daily Wire productions, as well as other right-wing, MAGA movie ventures, have been hacky. Lady Ballers, about an unsuccessful men’s basketball team pretending to be women so they can dominate the league, was an unsubtle, unfunny and ultimately unwatchable spoof of transgender athletes. And even plenty of higher-budget attempts, like Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, can still fall victim to wooden acting and writing.
But now, with the financial success of movies like The Sound of Freedom and biblical parables like The Chosen, bigger stars are being drawn to projects like the Daily Wire’s lineup of pro-ICE, anti-immigration and anti-LGBTQ movies. With those bigger stars may come new audiences who might not have watched a Christian movie or Daily Wire project otherwise. And where there is money and viewers, mainstream Hollywood will go, too, no matter how progressive people expect the industry to be. We’ve already gotten a biblical epic from Amazon Prime, with The House of David, and there are likely to be many more to come.
After all, it wasn’t so long ago, after all, that Cecil DeMille’s The Ten Commandments was the biggest movie in town.
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‘Heil’ Mary? New Atlanta Falcons logo inspires Nazi comparisons
If there was something off about the logo the Atlanta Falcons unveiled on social media Wednesday, whoever runs their accounts did, uh, not see it.
Behind the black falcon graphic that began appearing on the football team’s helmets in the 1960s was a new background — a flag of red, tan, black and white vertical stripes. To thousands of people who responded to the logo, it looked distinctly German — in a 1930s kind of way.
“The Atlanta Falcons are preparing to invade Poland,” one fan wrote.
A day after its posting, the new profile picture had unleashed a deluge of Nazi memes in the 4,000-plus replies on X. One picture swapped in the logo for Nazi flags in the background of a historical photo of a Hitler rally. Another edited the Falcon claw to look like a Nazi salute.
Others depicted Hitler in a Falcons cap, references to Inglourious Basterds and the Battle of the Bulge and a World War II joke invoking a blown lead in Super Bowl LI.
“Falcons were up 28-3 at Dunkirk,” that tweet read.
The Falcons’ snafu enters a small but growing catalogue of Reich-coded brand mixups. Who can forget the German national soccer team’s ‘44’ soccer jerseys? There was also the swastika-emblazoned Hallmark gift wrap; the accidental Hitler mugs; and (for my money) the worst of the bunch, Zara’s concentration camp uniform shirt.
All of those have been addressed; so far, the Falcons’ has not. We’ve reached out to them for comment.
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