Mosque Levinger

Mosche Levinger (2005)

Moshe Levinger ( Hebrew משה לוינגר; * 1935 in Jerusalem ; † May 16, 2015 ibid) was an Israeli Orthodox rabbi , co-founder of the radical Gush Emunim settler movement in Israel and the founder and rabbi of the settlements in Hebron and Kirjat Arba .

Life

Levinger was born in Jerusalem in 1935, two years after his parents immigrated from Germany after Hitler came to power . He studied in Jerusalem in different yeshivot and became a follower of Zwi Jehuda Kook , the son of Abraham Isaac Kooks .

Shortly after the 1967 Six Day War , during which the West Bank was occupied by Israeli troops, a group of 33 Orthodox Jews posing as Swiss tourists rented a room in the Park Hotel in Hebron's old town, led by Mosche Levinger. Levinger had previously placed a newspaper advertisement in which he was looking for families or individuals to repopulate the old town of Hebron. When they identified themselves as Jews, Levinger initially said that they would only stay during the Passover festival . After the feast, however, Levinger announced that they would remain in Hebron "until the coming of the Messiah ." After negotiations with the government, however, they moved to Kirjat Arba.

Following the Yom Kippur War of 1973 , the extra-parliamentary movement Gush Emunim (Block of Loyalists) was formed in 1974 under the leadership of Levinger, who was a member of the national religious Mafdal party at the time .

In 1979, on the 50th anniversary of the murder and expulsion of the Jews of Hebron in 1929, Levinger had his wife Miriam, who came from America, occupy the city's former Jewish hospital with 30 female settlers, thus giving the starting signal for the Jewish settlement activity in Hebron, which was accompanied by numerous violent conflicts.

In 1980 Levinger shot and killed a Palestinian shopkeeper in Hebron when he was attempting to expel Palestinian youths by shooting them in the air. In response, six settlers in Hebron were shot dead by Palestinians a short time later. When in 1984 a terrorist splinter group from the ranks of Gush Emunim was caught preparing to blow up five Arab buses, Levinger was convicted of complicity and given a prison sentence, of which he only served twelve days.

In May 1990 Levinger shot and killed a Palestinian and received a five-month prison sentence, of which he only served about ten weeks.

Levinger expressly welcomed the massacre committed by the Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein of 29 Palestinians in the Abraham Mosque in 1994 with the words: "The killing of strangers is acceptable and also welcome in order to promote the Jewish renaissance in the promised land."

In July 1995 Levinger was sentenced to seven months' imprisonment for his behavior in the patriarch's tomb in 1991. The court found that he tore down the wall dividing Jewish and Islamic believers and insulted an Israeli officer. In 1996 he served four months in prison from this sentence.

In December 1997, Levinger was sentenced to six months' imprisonment and a $ 2,300 fine for disrupting Muslim prayers in the Patriarch's Grotto and preventing an Israeli commander from entering Kiryat Arba.

In April 2002, Levinger's son Menasche Levinger was arrested for involvement in an attempted bomb attack on a Palestinian girls' school in East Jerusalem . Levinger rose to become the star of the pious maximalists in Israel. The most important saying of Levinger for the Israeli settler movement is: “Land is more important than life. No land may be returned just to save a few lives or even to prevent a war, because that would disregard divine commands and delay redemption. "

In total, Levinger has been convicted of at least ten crimes / offenses since 1975. He died on May 16, 2015 at the age of 80 in Jerusalem's Shaare Zedek Medical Center as a result of a stroke he had suffered seven years earlier and was buried the following day not far from the Grotto of the Patriarchs in Hebron .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Reuters, July 12, 1995; BBC Monitoring Service, July 13, 1995
2. ^ The Times, March 1, 1994.
3. ↑ Isabel Kershner: Moshe Levinger, Contentious Leader of Jewish Settlers in Hebron, Dies at 80. In: The New York Times, May 18, 2015 (accessed May 19, 2015).
4. ^ Settler leader Rabbi Moshe Levinger buried in Hebron. In: The Times of Israel, May 17, 2015 (accessed May 18, 2015).