Avraham Elkana Kahana Shapira

Avraham Elkana Kahana Shapira was born in Jerusalem in 1917.[1] He pursued his rabbinic education at Yeshivat Etz Chaim and subsequently at Hevron Yeshivah, where his primary teachers were Rabbis Moses Mordechai Epstein and Ezekiel Sarna.[1] During those formative years he formed personal friendships with several of the outstanding rabbinic personalities of his generation, among them Avraham Yeshayahu Karelitz — the Hazon Ish — Isaac Zev Soloveitchik, and Isser Zalman Meltzer.[1]

Shapira's ties to the broader world of Lithuanian-Ashkenazic scholarship deepened through a celebrated encounter with Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. He personally witnessed an episode from Soloveitchik's 1935 visit to the Land of Israel, when Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook attended Soloveitchik's lessons and explained that his father, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, had urged him not to miss any of them — comparing Soloveitchik's intellectual power to that of his grandfather, Rabbi Hayyim.[2] On meeting Soloveitchik himself for the first time, Shapira kissed him publicly and whispered, "it's a mitzvah to kiss a sefer Torah."[2] The story illustrates both the reverence he held for the greatest Talmudic minds of the age and the breadth of his connections across the major streams of Orthodox learning.

After his marriage, Shapira was invited to join the faculty of Merkaz ha-Rav Yeshiva, where he remained for more than fifty years.[1] During the 1960s he was numbered among the young rabbis studying there under Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, alongside the yeshiva's administrator Shalom Natan Raanan and senior teacher David Cohen, known as the Nazir.[3] His institutional ascent within the rabbinate came steadily: he was appointed to Jerusalem's Rabbinic Bet Din in 1956, joined the High Rabbinic Court in 1974, and was admitted to the Rabbinic Council of the Chief Rabbinate in 1980.[1]

In 1983 Shapira was elected Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, serving in that office until 1993.[4] He held the position concurrently with Sephardic Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu, and the two men together were widely regarded as the supreme halakhic and spiritual leaders of the country, carrying legal authority over Jewish religious arrangements in Israel.[4] One account describes them as the spiritual leaders of religious Zionism during that decade.[5] His term in office placed him at the center of some of the most contested religious and political questions of the era, from sovereignty over the Temple Mount to the future of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.

Following the death of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook in 1982, a contest arose over the headship of Mercaz Harav. Shapira was appointed rosh yeshiva rather than Rabbi Zvi Tau, though the transition generated internal tensions compounded by the appointment of Shapira's son as the yeshiva's executive director and by Shapira's emphasis on devoting more curriculum time to Talmud and less to Bible and Jewish thought.[1] In 1995, when his co-head Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli died, Shapira assumed sole leadership of the institution.[6] A further rupture came in 1997 after Shapira permitted students to pursue courses leading to a teaching certificate; in response, Tau and a cohort of teachers and students departed to found the Har ha-Mor yeshiva.[1] Despite these internal strains, Shapira guided Mercaz Harav until near the end of his life, eventually passing its leadership to his son, Rabbi Yaakov Shapira.[6]

Mercaz Harav was identified as the leading institution of the statist stream of religious Zionism — the outlook that regarded the establishment of the State of Israel as the beginning of divine redemption.[6] Shapira stood at the heart of that tradition, speaking for more than twenty years on the political and social questions of concern to the national-religious community.[1] Together with Chief Rabbi Eliyahu, he served as a defining spiritual reference point for Israel's religious Zionist camp across multiple generations.[1]

Shapira's first published work, released in 1948, was Zekher Yiẓḥak, an edition of responsa by Isaac Jacob Rabinowitz of Ponevezh.[1] His collected Talmud lectures appeared in six volumes in 1989, offering a systematic record of the teaching he had conducted at Mercaz Harav over decades.[1] Three volumes of essays under the title Minḥat Avraham were published between 1990 and 2003, and a further collection, Morashah, appeared in 2005.[1] Together, these publications preserved a substantial record of his Talmudic lectures and essays.

Beyond his written output, a personal recollection published after his death portrays Shapira as a memorable physical presence. It describes him leading Mercaz Harav students on the traditional Shavuot-night walk to the Western Wall — a short, elderly man who nonetheless moved at a pace so brisk that the group was forced into a near run to keep up with him.[7] In April 2007, just months before his death, he published a weekly article defending the customary recitation of Hallel on Israeli Independence Day, arguing that questioning the practice cast doubt on the obligation to thank God for the establishment of the State of Israel.[8]

One of the defining halakhic positions associated with Shapira was his ruling on Jewish access to the Temple Mount. His stance placed him within a religious-legal tradition — connected to the earlier view of Chief Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook — that forbade Jews from entering the Mount on grounds of ritual impurity and uncertainty about the precise location of the ancient Temple.[9] Shapira forbade access to the site generally, a position that also took into account what the sources describe as the political challenges to Jewish sovereignty posed by Arab aspirations and the administration of the Islamic Wakf.[9]

After the 1994 Israel–Jordan peace agreement, Shapira's position underwent a meaningful refinement. He came to support Jewish access to a limited northern area of the Temple Mount — a zone attributed to Herod's expansion of the complex — where the location of the Temple building itself was not in question.[9] He insisted, however, that a physical fence separate that permitted area from the regions farther south, which he continued to regard as forbidden.[9] He backed this more limited form of access together with Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu following the agreement, even though there was no prospect of erecting a synagogue on the site at that time.[9]

The institutional position remained more restrictive: in 1997, the Chief Rabbinate Council formally reconfirmed its general ban on Jewish access to the Temple Mount.[10] The decision underscored the gap that could exist between Shapira's individual halakhic reasoning and the more cautious collective posture of the Rabbinate as an institution.

No aspect of Shapira's public role generated more controversy than his halakhic rulings concerning Israeli withdrawal from territory and the evacuation of Jewish communities. In April 1994, amid discussions of a possible evacuation of Jewish residents of Hebron, he and other rabbis directed soldiers to reject orders to evacuate Jews from Hebron or other settlements, a position grounded in religious claims about the centrality of Hebron to Jewish history and faith.[11]

In July 1995, seven rabbis belonging to the Council of Religious Zionist Rabbis — a body headed by Shapira as former Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi — issued a formal religious edict, subsequently joined by eight more rabbis.[11] The edict declared that transferring IDF military bases to non-Jews was prohibited by Torah law, asserting that such a transfer violated a positive commandment and endangered both human life and the State of Israel.[11] The ruling was understood as an assertion of rabbinic authority over governmental decisions and drew intense and divided responses, including criticism that it could undermine the chain of military command.

The confrontation between Shapira's halakhic stance and state authority reached its most acute point during the 2005 Gaza disengagement. He became a vocal opponent of the plan to remove Jewish residents and uproot communities in Gaza, and issued a halakhic ruling forbidding IDF soldiers from obeying orders to participate in the evacuations.[1] In 2004 he had already told the newspaper Besheva that soldiers should refuse orders to expel Jews from their homes even at the cost of imprisonment, comparing such an expulsion in severity to desecrating the Sabbath or eating non-kosher food, and declaring that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon did not have the authority to order the expulsion of Jews.[12]

At a January 2005 meeting held at Shapira's home in Jerusalem's Kiryat Moshe neighborhood, the Union of Rabbis for the People of Israel and the Land of Israel — which he headed — together with representatives of rabbis from the United States, formally declared that security forces should not participate in evacuating settlements under the disengagement plan.[13] The declaration characterized the evacuation as a serious Torah prohibition, called for anyone who believed participation violated their faith or conscience to act accordingly, and simultaneously insisted that there must be no physical or verbal violence against security forces or fellow settlers.[13] Shapira also headed the broader Union of Rabbis for the Jewish People and the Land of Israel, whose ruling against soldiers' participation in evacuations relied on longstanding Chief Rabbinate decisions against evacuating parts of the Land of Israel and handing them to non-Jews, and argued that abandoning the land endangered Jewish lives.[14]

Despite the intensity of his opposition, Shapira maintained a distinction between principled halakhic resistance and lawlessness. In 2005 he met the newly appointed Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin at his Jerusalem home; the meeting was described by sources close to him as warm and friendly, and the two did not discuss their disagreements over the disengagement from Gaza and northern parts of the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria.[15] Shapira blessed Diskin with success "in defending the Nation of Israel" and stated explicitly that violence was not a justified means of stopping the withdrawal, expressing disgust at protesters who used road spikes and oil to impede security forces.[15] The disengagement ultimately exposed a fracture within religious Zionism itself: although Mercaz Harav was identified as the citadel of the statist stream that regarded the state as the beginning of redemption, Shapira's call for soldiers to refuse orders did not succeed in bringing his students along as a bloc, and the movement became divided.[6] The refusals remained limited: one account counted fewer than forty religious soldiers who refused, while another placed the total number of soldiers who disobeyed below one hundred.[1][14]

Shapira died on 28 September 2007.[16] Tens of thousands accompanied him to his funeral, with the procession departing from Mercaz Harav under heavy security — the presence of which was attributed to the timing of Friday Ramadan prayers on the Temple Mount.[16]

For more than fifty years at Mercaz Harav, Shapira taught generations of national-religious students.[1] The yeshiva's graduates included hundreds of rabbis, educators, public figures, and senior IDF officers.[6] His published corpus extended from the 1948 responsa edition to six volumes of Talmud lectures, three volumes of Minḥat Avraham, and the collection Morashah.[1] As one of the two chief rabbis who held the country's highest religious office during the 1980s and early 1990s, he also played a central institutional role in Israeli Orthodox life.[4]

His rulings on the disengagement and on soldiers' obligation of refusal became touchstones in the debate within religious Zionism about the relationship between halakhic authority and the democratic state. Although the calls did not produce mass refusal, they crystallized a theological worldview in which the sanctity of Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel imposed obligations upon the uniformed agents of the Jewish state. The resulting dispute exposed divisions within the religious-Zionist movement and placed strain on the statist outlook associated with Mercaz Harav.[6]

Several aspects of Shapira's public record generated genuine and significant controversy. His calls for IDF soldiers to disobey evacuation orders — both in connection with possible Hebron withdrawals in 1994 and during the 2005 Gaza disengagement — were criticized as an encroachment of rabbinic authority into military discipline and governmental decision-making.[11] Critics argued that such rulings undermined the military command structure and risked anarchy and disorder. Supporters countered that the rulings rested on longstanding halakhic principles and included explicit prohibitions on violence.[13]

Shapira's Temple Mount rulings also carried controversy, partly because his position shifted over time and partly because his individual stance diverged at points from the collective position of the Chief Rabbinate Council, which reconfirmed its general ban on access in 1997 even after he had begun supporting limited forms of Jewish ascent.[10] The gap between his personal halakhic reasoning and the institutional policy of the Rabbinate left room for varied interpretations of what, precisely, he permitted and what he forbade.

The leadership transition at Mercaz Harav following Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook's death was itself contested. The appointment of Shapira's son as the yeshiva's executive director and the subsequent curricular shifts prompted the departure in 1997 of Rabbi Zvi Tau and a substantial group of teachers and students, who established a rival institution.[1] These events reflected real tensions about the direction of a leading yeshiva in the religious-Zionist world.

Finally, the name "Avraham Shapira" is shared by more than one prominent Israeli public figure. A separate individual, Avraham Yosef Shapira — a businessman and Agudath Israel Knesset member born in Lviv in 1921 who died in 2000 — is entirely distinct from Rabbi Avraham Elkana Kahana Shapira.[17] Readers consulting sources on "Avraham Shapira" should verify which individual is meant.