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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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The post Rabbi Gershon Edelstein, revered haredi leader in Israel, dies at 100 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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A quiet diplomatic shift in the Middle East, with monumental consequences for Israel
Something significant is happening between Israel and Syria, and it deserves more attention than it is getting.
With the backing of the United States, Israeli and Syrian officials have agreed to create what they call a “joint fusion mechanism” — a permanent channel for coordination on intelligence, de-escalation, diplomacy and economic matters — during meetings in Paris. It appears to be the beginning of institutionalized contact between two countries that have formally been at war since 1948.
If this process continues, it will count as a genuine foreign-policy success for President Donald Trump’s administration.
To understand how profound that change would be, it is worth recalling the two countries’ shared history.
Israel and Syria — which the U.S. struck with a set of targeted attacks on the Islamic State on Saturday — have fought openly or by proxy for decades. Before 1967, Syrian artillery positions in the Golan Heights regularly shelled Israeli communities in the Hula Valley and around the Sea of Galilee. After Israel captured that region in 1967, the direct shelling stopped, but the conflict did not.
Syria remained formally committed to a state of war; Israel entrenched itself in the Golan Heights; both sides treated the frontier as a potential flashpoint to be managed carefully. After Egypt and Israel made peace in 1979, Syria became Israel’s most dangerous neighboring state.
A 1974 disengagement agreement created a United Nations-monitored buffer zone, which mostly ensured peace along the border, but did not resolve anything fundamental. In Lebanon, Israel and Syria backed opposing forces for years, and their air forces clashed briefly during the 1982 Lebanon War. Later, Iran’s growing role in Syria and Hezbollah’s military buildup added new threats. The Syrian civil war then destroyed basic state capacity and created precisely the kind of militia-rich environment Israel fears along its borders.
Now, with the dictator Bashar al-Assad gone and the former rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa in power, Syria is a broken country trying to stabilize. Sharaa’s past associations, disturbingly, include leadership of jihadist groups that were part of the wartime landscape in Syria. But today he governs a state facing economic collapse, infrastructure ruin and a population that needs jobs and basic services. His incentives are simple and powerful: ensure the survival of his regime, invite foreign investment, and secure relief from isolation and sanctions. Those goals point toward the U.S. and its partners, including Israel.
The Trump administration has made it clear that it wants to see new Syrian cooperation with Israel, with the suggestion that progress with Israel will become a gateway to international investment, and to a degree of political acceptance that Syria has lacked for years. Al-Sharaa’s willingness to engage is therefore not a mystery.
Israel’s motivations are also straightforward. After the Gaza war, Israel is facing a severe reputational problem. It is widely viewed abroad as reckless and excessively militarized. The government is under pressure over not only the conduct of the war but also the perception that it has no political strategy and relies almost exclusively on force. A diplomatic track with Syria allows Israel to present a very different picture: that of a country capable of negotiations with ideologically opposed neighbors, de-escalation, and regional cooperation.
There are significant security incentives, too.
Israel wants to limit Iran and Hezbollah’s influence in Syria. It wants a predictable northern border. It wants assurances regarding the Druze population in southern Syria — brethren to the Israeli Druze who are extremely loyal to the state, and who were outraged after a massacre of Syrian Druze followed the installation of al-Sharaa’s regime. It wants to ensure that no armed Syrian groups will tread near the Golan. A coordinated mechanism supervised by the U.S. offers a strong diplomatic way to address these issues.
The U.S. will benefit as well. The Trump team is eager to show that it can deliver lasting diplomatic achievements in the Middle East after the success of the Abraham Accords in Trump’s first term. A meaningful shift in Israel–Syria relations would be a very welcome addition, especially as the U.S.-brokered ceasefire in the Gaza war faces an uncertain future.
The main questions now are practical. Can the “joint fusion mechanism” function under pressure? What will happen when there is, almost inevitably, an incident — a drone downed, a militia clash, a cross-border strike? Will the new system effectively lower the temperature, or will it collapse at the first crisis?
Will Iran — facing its own profound internal political crisis — accept a Syria that coordinates with Israel under U.S. supervision, or will it work to undermine al-Sharaa? How will Hezbollah react if Damascus appears to move away from the axis of “resistance” and toward a security understanding with Israel?
How would an Israel-Syria deal impact Lebanon’s moribund efforts to dismantle Hezbollah’s military capacity? Al-Sharaa has already helped significantly by ending the transfer of weapons to Hezbollah from Iran through his territory. Might he also actively help with the disarming of the group?
No one should expect a full peace treaty soon. The question of possession of the Golan Heights probably remains a deal-breaker. Public opinion in Syria has been shaped by decades of official hostility to Israel, and Israeli politics is fragmented and volatile.
But diplomatic breakthroughs can confound expectations. They usually begin with mechanisms like this one, involving limited cooperation, routine contact and crisis management.
If this effort helps move the border from a zone of permanent tension to one of managed stability, that alone would be a major shift. It would also send a signal beyond the region: U.S. engagement still matters, and American pressure and incentives can still change behavior.
The post A quiet diplomatic shift in the Middle East, with monumental consequences for Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel’s Netanyahu Hopes to ‘Taper’ Israel Off US Military Aid in Next Decade
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to the press on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, July 8, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an interview published on Friday that he hopes to “taper off” Israeli dependence on US military aid in the next decade.
Netanyahu has said Israel should not be reliant on foreign military aid but has stopped short of declaring a firm timeline for when Israel would be fully independent from Washington.
“I want to taper off the military within the next 10 years,” Netanyahu told The Economist. Asked if that meant a tapering “down to zero,” he said: “Yes.”
Netanyahu said he told President Donald Trump during a recent visit that Israel “very deeply” appreciates “the military aid that America has given us over the years, but here too we’ve come of age and we’ve developed incredible capacities.”
In December, Netanyahu said Israel would spend 350 billion shekels ($110 billion) on developing an independent arms industry to reduce dependency on other countries.
In 2016, the US and Israeli governments signed a memorandum of understanding for the 10 years through September 2028 that provides $38 billion in military aid, $33 billion in grants to buy military equipment and $5 billion for missile defense systems.
Israeli defense exports rose 13 percent last year, with major contracts signed for Israeli defense technology including its advanced multi-layered aerial defense systems.
US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a staunch Israel supporter and close ally of Trump, said on X that “we need not wait ten years” to begin scaling back military aid to Israel.
“The billions in taxpayer dollars that would be saved by expediting the termination of military aid to Israel will and should be plowed back into the US military,” Graham said. “I will be presenting a proposal to Israel and the Trump administration to dramatically expedite the timetable.”
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In Rare Messages from Iran, Protesters ask West for Help, Speak of ‘Very High’ Death Toll
Protests in Tehran. Photo: Iran Photo from social media used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law, via i24 News
i24 News – Speaking to Western media from beyond the nationwide internet blackout imposed by the Islamic regime, Iranian protesters said they needed support amid a brutal crackdown.
“We’re standing up for a revolution, but we need help. Snipers have been stationed behind the Tajrish Arg area [a neighborhood in Tehran],” said a protester in Tehran speaking to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity. He added that “We saw hundreds of bodies.”
Another activist in Tehran spoke of witnessing security forces firing live ammunition at protesters resulting in a “very high” number killed.
On Friday, TIME magazine cited a Tehran doctor speaking on condition of anonymity that just six hospitals in the capital recorded at least 217 killed protesters, “most by live ammunition.”
Speaking to Reuters on Saturday, Setare Ghorbani, a French-Iranian national living in the suburbs of Paris, said that she became ill from worry for her friends inside Iran. She read out one of her friends’ last messages before losing contact: “I saw two government agents and they grabbed people, they fought so much, and I don’t know if they died or not.”