Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Haredim and Zionism" in English language version.
The saintly Rabbi Israel Meir ha-Cohen invoked the talmudic passage of the three oaths to remind his followers that the Jewish fate was to remain in exile until redeemed by God.
In another letter to one of the harsh anti-Zionists, Blau gave an excellent description of how he conceived this tragic situation: "Your Honor is mistaken in thinking that peace with the Arabs is possible. The Arabs hate us bitterly. We do not want to cut off the shackles of the Diaspora, but neither do we want to be killed and slaughtered, to be like dung in the field."
There is no doubt that R. Hayyim expressed an extreme anti-Zionist position; when the Zionists in Brisk argued that Zionism constituted a barrier against the assimilation of western Jews, he replied that, for Judaism, the quality, not the quantity of it was essential. By limiting the concept of klal yisrael (the entire Jewish people) to the "God-fearing" alone, he was moving closer to the philosophers of German Orthodoxy.
The most eminent Orthodox rabbis of the first decade of the twentieth century, among them the Lubavitcher rebbe Sholom Dov Ber Schneersohn, issued powerful condemnations of political Zionism. In 1903 Schneersohn warned that the Zionists "have made nationalism a substitute for the Torah and the commandments... After this assumption is accepted, anyone who enters the movement regards himself as no longer obliged to keep the commandments of the Torah, nor is there any hope consequently that at some time or another he will return, because, according to his own reckoning, he is a proper Jew in that he is a loyal nationalist.
In the inter-war period, the rabbi of Munkács (Mukačevo), Chaim Elazar Spira (Shapira, 1872–1937)—at that time the most resolute opponent of Zionism among Hasidic rabbis—described the three gates of Hell: "The lack of faith of many elements of European Jewry, the absolute subjugation to money in America, and Zionism which was gaining ground in Jerusalem!
Around this time, the Agudah translated into Hebrew and printed (and then reprinted several times, for interest was high), a pamphlet by Elchanan Wasserman, the headmaster of the Talmudic academy in Baranowicze, who was killed by the Nazis in 1941. It was Wasserman's view that, theologically, the Zionists were to blame for the Nazis, for they embraced "two idolatries" - socialism and nationalism. The rest was inevitable, Wasserman wrote: "In Heaven, the two idolatries were fashioned into one—national-socialism. A terrible rod of fury was forged from them that strikes at Jews in every corner of the earth. The same abominations that we worshipped are now hammering us."
Rabbi Elhanan Wasserman (1875–1941), a disciple of Hafetz Haim and a pillar of Lithuanian Judaism, compared Zionists to the members of the Yevsektzia, the Jewish section of the Soviet Communist Party. Wielding their own version of secularized messianism, the Jewish Communists attacked traditional Jewish life with extraordinary vehemence.
Rosenheim, the political head of central European Orthodoxy, who was accustomed to using far more moderate language, nevertheless warned the religious Zionists against the 'mortal danger' they risked by collaborating with those who did not accept the divine law.
Before 1939, there had been great bitterness in the ultra-orthodox community against the Zionists. Families were divided and dissidents expelled. Even during the war, such feelings persisted. For a year, Lithuania was sandwiched in between the two revolutionary goliaths of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia; yet, the majority of the heads of the great learning academies, the yeshivot, advocated staying put rather than attempting to leave for Palestine. Instead, they and their followers marched into the gas chambers singing nigunim. The Shoah destroyed the community of the faithful in Eastern Europe, and the ultra-orthodox perished in vast numbers. Such a tragedy softened the position of the survivors towards Zionism. It moved many from and anti-Zionist position to a non-Zionist one.
It is interesting to recall here the attitude of the famous Sephardic Rabbi Baba Sali towards Va-Yoel Moshe: "This book is a great and important treatise for our generation, and Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum is a pillar of light whose radiance will lead us to the coming of the Messiah." Rabbi Baba Sali studied the book itself over the course of a few days... and said that this book answered all his questions about Zionism "truly and uncompromisingly".
Perhaps, the most prominent Sephardic legal authority, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef of Jerusalem, upholds Rabbi Feinstein's verdict and, in his comment, specifies that "those who chose this flag as a symbol of the State were evil-doers". Emphasizing that removing the flag, "a vain and useless object", from the synagogue should be done in harmony and peace, he recommends "uprooting all related to the flag so that it should not constitute a reminder of the acts of the evil-doers".
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)One of the main struggles between the Jewish groups was over education, the future of Jewry. In 1943, a group of about 700 orphaned children, Holocaust refugees who had escaped from Poland to the Soviet Union, were collected by the Jewish Agency's emissaries and brought to Israel. They were put in a camp organized by the Tehran Jewish Agency, where they were poisoned against religion.
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