Thursday, April 13, 2017

The Kabbalist Who Would Be King of a New Jewish Monarchy in Israel

Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh

The crowd was eclectic, from stern, black-garbed ultra-Orthodox men to youths of both sexes bedecked in colorful, hippie-like clothes. They hailed from homes as far as Safed, the kabbalist center in Israel’s North, and as remote as isolated hilltop settlements in the occupied West Bank. Even a few New Age types from secular Tel Aviv were in evidence.
The 3,000 men, women and children at Tel Aviv’s newly renovated Habima Square last December were waiting anxiously to hear Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, the St. Louis-born mystic and scholar whose quiet demeanor belies incendiary scholarly writings that are inspiring a generation of Jewish supremacists.
The venue marked something of a mainstream coming-out milestone for Ginsburgh. Every year since 2011, in cooperation with the Chabad Hasidic sect, Ginsburgh has held an epic event on “Redemption Holiday,” a Chabad-Lubavitch festivity set for the 19th of Kislev on the Hebrew calendar — the day in 1798 that czarist authorities in Russia released Chabad’s founder, Rabbi Schneur Zalman, from jail. After years of staging the event in heavily Orthodox Jerusalem, this was the first time that Ginsburgh, a longtime Chabad adherent, held the event in Tel Aviv, in one of the city’s most prominent secular venues.
An American transplant to Israel, Ginsburgh is best known for his teachings that seem to give license to Jewish vengeance attacks against Palestinians. His critics claim that Ginsburgh’s influence lies behind the worst Jewish terror attacks of the past 20 years, from the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, to the massacre in Hebron of 29 Palestinians by Baruch Goldstein, who he hailed and endorsed in a book soon after the murders.

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