A BLACK DAY
A sea of Haredi mourners accompany the body of Rabbi Shmuel Auerbach during an emotional funeral procession in Jerusalem yesterday. Auerbach, who died on Saturday at 86, headed the extremist ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem Faction, a group known for its extreme opposition to military conscription for its adherents, which put it at odds with much of Israel’s mainstream.
Tens of thousands of Haredi men from Jerusalem and ultra-Orthodox strongholds around the country came to the capital on Sunday for the funeral of Rabbi Shmuel Auerbach, a hard-line conservative who rocked the country with protests against Haredi military service.
Auerbach died suddenly on Friday night following a heart attack. He was 86. In a somewhat unusual move, his funeral was postponed from Saturday night to Sunday, reportedly so more mourners could attend and give honor to Auerbach, who was considered a great Torah scholar.
Several of the rabbi’s close colleagues and associates gave eulogies during the funeral ceremony in the Sha’arei Hessed neighborhood of Jerusalem where Auerbach lived. Some of the speakers were fiery in their insistence that Auerbach’s uncompromising opposition to Haredi military service and accommodation with the state and modernity would be continued.
Rabbi Tzvi Friedman, a prominent rabbi in Bnei Brak and supporter of the Jerusalem Faction that Auerbach led, said that a “war of extermination” is being conducted, a reference to the erroneous claims of the Jerusalem Faction that yeshiva students are being forcibly drafted into the IDF.
“[But] none of the haters of all types should think that the campaign is lost,” Friedman continued, now that Auerbach had died. “They can fill up all the prisons, it won’t help them at all.”
The Hapeles newspaper, the mouthpiece of the Jerusalem Faction, hastened to publish a mourning notice from 12 prominent rabbis associated with the faction who pledged to uphold Auerbach’s uncompromising positions on matters affecting the Haredi community.
“With God’s help, we will merit to continue bright path, as he [Auerbach] instructed us, and in accordance with his request and his instructions to us in just the last few days,” the 12 rabbis averred.
It is thought that this group of rabbis could eventually constitute a council of Torah sages for the Jerusalem Faction and its Bnei Torah political party, as a replacement for Auerbach’s leadership.
Among those rabbis are Auerbach’s brother Rabbi Azriel Auerbach, a rabbi in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Bayit Vegan. Azriel Auerbach is thought to be more moderate than his late sibling but he has been increasingly associated within the last two years with the Jerusalem Faction and its decision-making echelons, especially in the capital.
Other prominent figures among the 12 were the deans of the Ponevezh Yeshiva Rabbi Shmuel Markowitz; Rabbi Tzvi Friedman who gave one of the eulogies; and Rabbi Asher Hacohen Deutsch, a respected hard-line figure in Bnei Brak.
None of these figures, however, are considered to be a rabbinic heavyweight, and this lack of a “Torah giant” amongst the leadership ranks of the Jerusalem Faction is likely to be a significant problem for the legitimacy and authority of the movement.
According to Yisroel Cohen, a senior reporter for the Kikar HaShabbat Haredi news website, the Jerusalem Faction leadership was totally unprepared for Auerbach’s death and no one figure has been groomed to inherit the movement’s mantle of leadership.
The prompt and prominent announcement by the 12 rabbis was clearly an attempt to demonstrate that even though there is no one supreme decision maker for the movement, there is a clear line of succession for the decision-making process which has been vested in this nascent council of Torah sages.
“What unites these 12 rabbis is that they have taken the conservative, isolationist path of Rabbi Auerbach who took this approach to the extremes, and they have this same attitude,” Cohen told The Jerusalem Post.
Cohen said, however, that there are internal divisions within the faction regarding the correct approach to matters such as military service, among others, and that the group faces significant challenges in the coming months to preserve its unity and its influence.
He said it would be hard to imagine large numbers of the Jerusalem Faction returning to the mainstream Haredi community, given the deep divisions within the sector over the political schism, including institutions such as yeshivas and synagogues which have become split between the two camps.