Yitzchak Rafa'el

Yitzchak Rafa'el (1951)

Yitzchak Rafa'el ( Hebrew יִצְחָק רָפָאֵל, as Jitzchak Werfel in Hebrew יִצְחָק וֶרְפֶל; * July 5, 1914 in Sassiw , Galicia , Austria-Hungary ; † August 3, 1999 in Israel ) was an Israeli politician who served as minister of religion in Israel in the mid-1970s.

Life

Rafa'el attended high school in Poland . He was a member of the HaPo'el haMisrachi youth movement and founded a local branch of the Zionist religious movement Bne Akiwa ( Hebrew בְּנֵי עֲקִיבָא( Sons of Akivah )). In 1935 he immigrated to Palestine , where he worked as a teacher in Jerusalem . He attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and earned an MA in Humanities . He attended the theological seminary, New York , where he received a doctorate in literature. For his dissertation on a work by the medieval Provencal rabbi Abraham ben Nathan, he and Yehuda Ratzaby were awarded the Bialik Prize in 1979 in the Science of Judaism category.

Rafa'el worked for the Jewish Agency and was responsible for the artisans and small business owners department. From 1940 to 1947 he published a small journal. He was a member of the Hagana and represented the HaPo'el haMisrachi party in the Palestinian parliament during the mandate period in 1944. In 1948 he was a member of the Wa'adat Yeruschalajim (lit. Jerusalem Committee ). From 1948 to 1953 he was a committee member of the Jewish Agency and headed the department for immigration, where he was responsible for the large influx of Jewish refugees (over 685,000 from 1948 to 1951). He rejected demands to limit the number of immigrants.

In 1951 he was on the electoral list of HaPo'el haMisrachi and became a member of the Knesset . He was re-elected in 1955 and also in 1959 (when HaPo'el haMisrachi was incorporated into the National Religious Party ) and on November 2, 1961, he was appointed Deputy Minister of Health . He was in office until David Ben-Gurion resigned as Prime Minister in June 1963. July 1963 he was again Deputy Minister of Health and remained in office until March 22, 1965. He was re-elected in 1965 and 1969 and became chairman of the National Religious Party (NRP) after the death of Chaim-Moshe Shapira in July 1970 . He was re-elected in 1973 and appointed Minister of Religion by Golda Meir on March 10, 1974 , and remained in office until June 3, 1974. However, Golda Meir resigned as prime minister and when Yitzchak Rabin then formed a new government coalition in June 1974, the National Religious Party (NRP) was not represented in the coalition and Rafael left the government cabinet. However, when the party joined the ruling coalition in October of the same year, Rafael was appointed minister of religion on October 30, 1974 and remained in office until December 22, 1976, when all the ministers of the National Religious Party were dismissed in December 1976 in response to a motion of no confidence to abstain. In the same year he lost the chairmanship of the National Religious Party when Zebulon Hammer and Josef Burg joined forces to drive him out of office. In the 1977 election, Rafa'el lost his seat and retired from politics.

See also

• List of the winners of the Bialik Prize

Web links

• Yitzchak Rafa'el on knesset .gov.il

Individual evidence

1. ↑ List of Bialik Prize recipients 1933-2004 (Hebrew), Tel Aviv Municipality Website ( Hebrew ) Archived from the original on December 17, 2007. Retrieved August 17, 2013.
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Yitzhak Rafael: Politician who welcomed immigrants to Israel . In: The Guardian , August 9, 1999