Judah Alkalai, 1798-1878
Alkalai is credited with the idea of a national fund for Jewish land purchases. Adamant about the Jewish people returning to Eretz Yisrael, he advocated statehood in a booklet called “Shema Yisrael.” After the Damascus…
Michelle Cohen Farber, 1971-
Farber studied the Talmud at Bar-Ilan University and graduated from the Midreshet Lindenbaum’s scholars program for women. Without the option to be an Orthodox rabbi, she uses the title rabbanit and advocates for more women…
Abraham Isaac Kook, 1865-1935
Kook was born in Latvia and was one of the fathers of Religious Zionism. As a rabbi in London, he rallied popular support for the Balfour Declaration. After he immigrated to Palestine in 1919, Kook…
Yisrael Meir Lau, 1937-
The youngest survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp, Lau arrived in the Land of Israel with a brother in 1945. He was the chief rabbi of Netanya from 1978 to 1988 and of Tel Aviv…
Samuel Mohilever, 1824-1898
Born in Lithuania and ordained at the Volozhin yeshiva, Mohilever was a founder of the Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) movement in Russia and served as its president in the 1880s. He helped launch Religious…
Isaac Jacob Reines, 1839-1915
A Lithuanian Orthodox rabbi born in Belarus, Reines was one of the earliest leaders of Religious Zionism, supported an unsuccessful effort to establish a settlement mixing Torah and labor in the early 1890s, and founded…
Ephraim Urbach, 1912-1991
Urbach was a religion scholar and rabbi whose seminal work, The Sages, focused on the evolution of Jewish religious and social thought. A native of Poland, Urbach studied in Rome and Breslau before immigrating to…
Zerach Warhaftig, 1906-2002
Belarus-born Warhaftig persuaded Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara to issue 3,500 visas for Jews fleeing Lithuania at the start of World War II, then escaped to Canada via Japan. He reached the Land of Israel in…
Ovadia Yosef, 1920-2013
Born in Baghdad, Yosef in 1984 founded Shas, an Orthodox Sephardi political party. He exerted authority within the party and backed government funding for the poor and Orthodox. An important Talmudic scholar, he served as…
