Menachem Froman

Froman was born in 1945 in Kfar Hasidim, in Mandatory Palestine.[1][5] His parents came from Gur Hasidic families but had left religious observance, and he grew up in Kfar Hasidim.[6] He attended the Reali School in Haifa and served as a youth counselor in HaNoar HaOved VeHaLomed.[6] His subsequent return to religious life followed a youth that included both secular education and participation in that youth movement.[6]

He served in the Nahal paratroopers during the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War, and belonged to the paratroop unit that helped liberate Jerusalem in 1967.[6][5] The death of a childhood friend in one of the wars brought him a profound personal crisis.[6] He later returned to religious observance and became a student of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook.[6]

Froman studied at the Hebrew University, Mercaz Harav, and other yeshivot, and received rabbinic ordination from Rabbis Shlomo Goren and Avraham Shapira.[1] His wish to combine academic study with Torah learning figured in an episode involving Kook: because the yeshiva's sleeping accommodation was reserved for students devoted entirely to Torah study, Kook would not allow him to sleep there while pursuing academic studies.[6] Nevertheless, Kook housed Froman in his own home for approximately half a year so that he would have somewhere to live.[6]

Froman participated in the founding of Gush Emunim in 1974 and became a member of its leadership.[1][2] The movement sought to expand Jewish presence in territories captured after 1967, particularly the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria.[7] Froman's involvement in the settlement movement developed alongside a commitment to dialogue with Palestinians rather than replacing that commitment.[1][7]

He served as rabbi of Kibbutz Migdal Oz from 1978 to 1982 and then as rabbi of Tekoa from 1982 until his death in 2013.[1] His educational work included teaching at several yeshivot, heading a Torah institute, and teaching at the Tekoa yeshiva and the hesder yeshiva in Otniel, in the southern Hebron Hills.[4] He gave weekly classes in the Zohar, a foundational work of Jewish mysticism, and brought mystical teaching to people both within and beyond the Orthodox community.[5][4] Young people sometimes gathered around him for improvised lessons while he traveled by bus to teach.[5]

His religious and cultural activities extended beyond formal teaching institutions.[4] An early figure in the Hasidic current within Religious Zionism, Froman was also a poet and artist who appeared with musicians including Ehud Banai, Evyatar Banai, and Berry Sakharof in efforts to bring different parts of Israeli society closer together.[4] He maintained close relationships with the left-wing writers Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua, jokingly referring to them as the Ashkenazi and Sephardi chief rabbis.[4] He frequently published poems and articles in the daily press, especially Haaretz and Davar, and his poetry collection Adam min ha-aretz (A Man of the Land) appeared in 1994.[1]

Froman advocated dialogue with Palestinians in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, including their political and religious leadership, with the stated aim of advancing coexistence among Jews, Muslims, and Christians in the Land of Israel.[1] His interlocutors included Faisal Husseini, Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.[6][8] He participated in the 1991 Madrid Summit and met Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan following the 2010 Marmara raid.[8] These contacts formed part of his pursuit of a peace process in which religious leaders and religious commitments would have a direct role.[6]

He argued that religion could not be left outside efforts to make peace because it was a powerful force among both Jewish and Arab publics.[5] His reasoning rested on a belief that religious Jews and Muslims shared a desire to bring about God's rule in the world and could therefore address one another through religious language.[6] He sought a temporary hudna, or cessation of fighting, with Hamas, proposing that religious leaders leave ultimate messianic claims to God while people stopped fighting.[6] This approach was intended to reduce bloodshed without first requiring agreement on every ultimate religious or political claim.[6]

Froman met Ahmed Yassin and other Hamas leaders during the 1990s, first in an Israeli prison and later in Gaza, and met Arafat during the Second Intifada.[9] He attempted to use religious dialogue to secure the release of kidnapped soldier Nachshon Wachsman, who was subsequently killed by his Hamas captors.[6] His encounters did not exclude direct condemnation: he reportedly told Yassin that God would send him to hell for killing women and children, while arguing that the Qur'an forbade those killings.[6] In 2007, he also drew up a peace plan with a Hamas journalist.[5]

His explanation for engaging Hamas emphasized the need to reckon with forces actually present in the region.[10] He said that he would have preferred to deal with Sufis, whom he regarded as a moderate Islamic current, but believed that a realistic peace effort had to take Hamas into account.[10] At a 2006 interfaith peace gathering in Jerusalem, he participated alongside bereaved peace activist Yitzhak Frankenthal and Muslim politician Ibrahim Sarsur.[10] Hamas legislator Mohammed Abu Tir did not attend; the organizers said the Shin Bet had prevented Hamas members from entering West Jerusalem.[10]

Froman's attachment to Jewish settlement did not depend, in his own political thinking, on continued Israeli sovereignty over every settlement.[11][12] He believed settlements could become points of contact between Israelis and Palestinians and should remain even if Israel ceded territory.[3][11] Before the 2005 Gaza disengagement, he and A. B. Yehoshua jointly initiated a conference examining whether the Gush Katif settlements could remain under Palestinian sovereignty.[12] At that conference, he urged reconsideration of national identity, treating nationalism and statehood as outdated frameworks and emphasizing people's physical attachment to the land.[12]

He argued that both communities should respect one another's deep roots in the land.[12] In his proposed arrangement, Palestinians would accept Jews living and working the land as a minority within the Palestinian Authority, just as, in his comparison, Israelis accepted Arab citizens' ties to the land.[12] He opposed evacuating settlements in Sinai and the Gaza Strip and rejected the equation of love for the land with an automatic right to sovereignty over it.[9] His opposition to removing settlements was also described as grounded in moral considerations.[4]

His political proposals included support for a two-state solution, which he expressed during a mosque visit in 2010.[13] A later account of his views described Palestinian independence alongside Israel as an interim stage toward a single “human state,” shared by Israelis and Palestinians, with one army and one government.[9] Within this outlook, a religiously grounded hudna with Hamas appeared to him more achievable than an effort to resolve the conflict without addressing religious beliefs.[9] His proposals thus included both immediate arrangements for coexistence and a longer-term vision that went beyond separate national sovereignty.[12][9]

Passages from My Hasidim Laugh at Me express his insistence that political thought begin with the actual presence of Arabs in the land.[3] In one episode, he saw a yeshiva student wearing a shirt bearing the slogan “if there are no Arabs there will be no terror attacks” and challenged him by asking what should be done when Arabs were present.[3] Another passage depicts settlements as fingers extended in a handshake: their location among Palestinians could, in his image, place them in another person's palm rather than make them instruments of separation.[3] A maxim attributed to him similarly stated that the land did not belong to Israelis and Palestinians, but that Israelis and Palestinians belonged to the land.[14]

Froman also developed an educational response to the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.[15] He wrote an unpublished, 39-page curriculum intended for Israel's national school system, drawing a parallel between Rabin and Isaac the Patriarch through themes of rootedness, sacrifice, and the capacity to yield.[15] The curriculum combined Jewish mysticism, Zionist identity, and civic education to envision a Religious Zionism grounded in humility and shared national belonging.[15] It offered a comprehensive religious and educational framework at a time when most Religious Zionist leaders remained silent or limited their responses to sermons, using religious narratives to confront political violence and social polarization.[15]

His opposition to Jewish violence included speaking against “price tag” attacks and Jewish terrorism, visiting affected villages, and maintaining close relationships with Arab citizens of Israel.[4] He joined protests against the closing of investigations into the deaths of Arab citizens during the October 2000 events.[4] In 2005, he spoke at the funeral of people killed in Eden Natan-Zada's shooting attack on an Arab bus in Shfaram.[4] He also opposed collective punishment and policies he characterized as a “siege of starvation.”[9]

In 2010, Froman visited a damaged mosque in Lubban al-Sharqiya and offered to bring settlers to help repair it.[13] He said Jewish law treated damage to a mosque as equivalent to damage to a synagogue, while expressing support for coexistence and a two-state solution.[13] Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad said his government would restore the building.[13] In October of that year, after a mosque near Beit Fajar was torched, Froman joined rabbis from nearby Jewish settlements in a solidarity visit and handed over a box of replacement Qurans.[16]

After a mosque in Qusra was vandalized in September 2011, he stood at its entrance wearing tefillin and called out “Allahu Akbar.”[9] He then declared: “God will punish whoever did this. God is stronger than Satan, and peace is stronger than terror.”[9] Such visits accompanied his broader effort to make religious commitment a basis for solidarity across communal boundaries.[4][9]

In his later years, Froman established Eretz Shalom, or Land of Peace, bringing Jews and Arabs together to seek a political solution through the people living in the West Bank.[4] A gathering organized by the movement brought settlers, left-wing Israelis, and Palestinians together to pursue peace “from below.”[17] After being diagnosed with cancer, he added “Chai Shalom,” meaning “Living Peace,” to his name and said reconciliation between Jews and Arabs, and between left and right, would become his central pursuit.[17] He described engagement with the Muslim religious world as something that had previously been a “hobby” but would now become his main work.[17]

Froman was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2010 and continued giving talks, sermons, and interviews as his condition allowed.[4] In a passage from My Hasidim Laugh at Me, he described beginning to prepare for death and study about it after learning that his illness was advanced, while maintaining hope that God could still change the outcome.[3] Acceptance of the doctors' assessment coexisted with religious hope and continued activity.[3] He died at his home in Tekoa on March 4, 2013, aged 68, after three years of illness, and was survived by his wife, Hadassah, and their ten children.[4]

Thousands gathered for Froman's funeral in Tekoa.[7] His son Yossi recalled that his father had wanted mourners to sing “I Have No Other Land” and urged those present to connect opposing sides through love and freedom.[7] Froman's reputation after his death continued to encompass both his role as a settlement rabbi and his work for Israeli-Palestinian coexistence.[18] An obituary published in the Palestinian Authority daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida in March 2013 called him “a settler and peace activist” who had worked vigorously toward a peaceful solution to the conflict.[19]

His literary legacy includes the poetry published during his lifetime and further books of his work that appeared after his death.[1] Passages from My Hasidim Laugh at Me present freedom as a religious value rather than an alternative to religious commitment, treating marriage and religious life as compatible with freedom.[3] The phrase “humility is reality” encapsulates another concern in those passages: how faith could remain connected to the world rather than become detached from it.[3] His writings joined reflections on personal religious life with arguments about the practical responsibilities of living alongside another people.[3]

The archive preserving his papers covers the years 1958–2015 and comprises 1.6 meters of material in Hebrew, Arabic, and English.[1] Hadassah Froman donated it in June 2016 through his student Shlomo Spivak.[1] It contains correspondence; manuscripts of poems, plays, stories, and articles; press clippings; photographs; and materials concerning his public activity.[1] It also preserves material collected after his death, including obituaries, eulogies, condolence letters, and articles about him.[1]

His unpublished Rabin curriculum survives among those papers, preserving a detailed example of his effort to bring Jewish religious thought into civic education and reconciliation.[15] His life has also become the subject of a biography presenting him as a rabbi, poet, and public intellectual concerned with the connections among religion, nationalism, and reconciliation.[2] Students continued to transmit his ideas, including the maxim about Israelis and Palestinians belonging to the land, while filmed material preserved images of him praying with Palestinians.[14]

Froman's meetings with Palestinian leaders, especially Hamas figures, and his political positions provoked intense controversy within the settlement camp.[1] More extreme elements subjected him to boycotts, ostracism, and death threats.[4] Criticism also came from some students and family members concerning aspects of his behavior, and his engagement with Hamas did not mean that he supported a generous prisoner-exchange agreement.[6] A later account states that he left Gush Emunim's leadership after it refused to condemn the Jewish Underground.[9]

The combination of opposition to settlement evacuation and pursuit of Palestinian partnership remained a central point of dispute.[2][11] His peace advocacy operated within a settlement enterprise associated with military rule over Palestinians, even as he imagined settlements becoming places of contact rather than obstacles to agreement.[11] In a Jewish Review of Books account, Tekoa founder Bobby Brown recalled in a 2009 interview that Froman had warm relations with Hamas and others disliked by many residents, while noting that he continued to live in the community.[20]

Accounts of the damage to the Lubban al-Sharqiya mosque also differed: Palestinians alleged that settlers had torched it, whereas police reportedly announced that it had not been torched.[13] Froman's visit and offer to help repair the building took place amid those differing explanations.[13]