Summary
Bnei Akiva, the religious Zionist youth movement closely associated with the state religious school system, with 25,000-30,000 members in 150 branches in Lustick’s account, whose graduates formed a major recruitment pool for Gush Emunim (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 3, lines 2750-2900).
Details
- Bnei Akiva originated from the religious kibbutz movement, and a large proportion of its leadership traditionally came from religious kibbutzim; after the Six Day War it turned its energies away from traditional “Torah and Labor” toward the whole Land of Israel and the messianic ideas surrounding it (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 3, lines 2750-2900).
- Embodying the generation of the knitted yarmulka, its members and graduates prided themselves on combining patriotic duty, including military service and settlement, with religious observance and study; in the mid-1970s Gush Emunim drew thousands of Bnei Akiva youths into its marches, demonstrations and settlement actions (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 3, lines 2750-2900).
- The Gahelet fraternity around Tzvi Yehuda Kook was composed of elitist Bnei Akiva graduates, including future Gush leaders Haim Druckman, Moshe Levinger and Eleazar Waldman (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 2, lines 1765-1790).
Related pages
For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Gush Emunim, Tzvi Yehuda Kook, Yeshivot Hesder