Moshe Hillel Hirsch

Hirsch was born in the United States and was known during his American years as Milton Hirsch.[2] His parents were immigrants from Hungary who reached the United States before the Holocaust and worked in catering.[2] He grew up in an American Haredi environment in New York and attended a yeshiva high school whose religious studies were relatively basic.[2] His subsequent education brought him to Lakewood Yeshiva in New Jersey and into a close relationship with its founder, Rabbi Aharon Kotler.[2]

At approximately seventeen, before completing his high-school examinations, Hirsch left to study at Lakewood.[2] He quickly distinguished himself in his studies and became one of Kotler’s close students.[2] Kotler entrusted him with recording his lectures, giving Hirsch a role in preserving his teacher’s instruction as well as studying it.[2] After Kotler’s death, Hirsch helped edit the series of books based on those lectures.[2] His association with Kotler thus included both personal discipleship and work on the written transmission of Kotler’s teachings.[2]

Hirsch later recalled an intensive pattern of study in which he and his fellow students devoted three weeks to a single Talmudic passage.[2] They studied from morning until 2 a.m., examining the text, considering its commentators, and working through the questions it raised.[2] His recollection also included an informal interlude: after such a stretch, “we’d go out on a motorcycle to look for somewhere to eat sausage,” before returning for another three weeks of study.[2] The account joined the demanding schedule of his Lakewood years with a personal memory of life outside the study hall.[2]

His marriage connected him to Slabodka Yeshiva through Rabbi Mordechai Schulman, its head.[2] When Schulman sought a husband for his daughter, he asked his friend Kotler for a recommendation, and Kotler suggested Hirsch.[2] Hirsch was in his thirties when he married Schulman’s daughter.[2] His first visit to Israel was for Kotler’s funeral; five years later, he moved there with his wife and their two children.[2] He joined Slabodka as Schulman’s son-in-law and as a respected yeshiva scholar, establishing the institutional connection that would become central to his career.[2]

Hirsch also recalled experiencing antisemitism during his New York childhood, including being called a “dirty Jew.”[4] He related that memory much later during a meeting with U.S. Ambassador Jack Lew about rising antisemitism in the United States.[4] In that conversation, his childhood experience served as the personal background to his concern about the direction of contemporary American Jewish life.[4]

After becoming a prominent rabbi at Slabodka, Hirsch succeeded his father-in-law as one of the yeshiva’s heads following Schulman’s death.[2] His work there centered on religious scholarship and teaching, while his influence eventually reached educational questions and the wider public affairs of the Lithuanian Haredi community.[2] Students described him as continuing to prepare his general lectures through renewed examination of sources and commentators even after years of delivering them.[2] The close attention to texts that characterized his account of studying at Lakewood therefore also appeared in descriptions of his later teaching at Slabodka.[2]

An important step in his emergence as a public adviser came in connection with Rabbi Nosson Kamenetsky’s 2002 book, “Making of a Godol.”[2] The book presented leading rabbis as human beings who experienced failures and conflicts, and it provoked opposition among some rabbis.[2] Rabbi Aharon Leib Steinman suggested consulting Hirsch, then about sixty, about the book’s American cultural context.[2] Hirsch’s familiarity with that setting was brought to bear on a question that involved religious education as well as the presentation of rabbinic lives.[2]

Steinman was impressed by Hirsch’s religious, educational, and cultural analysis of the book.[2] The episode led other rabbis to consult Hirsch on additional educational and public matters, extending his role beyond his own yeshiva.[2] His growing influence thus included providing advice to other religious leaders, rather than only teaching students or administering Slabodka.[2] The consultations connected his American upbringing and education with questions being considered by senior Lithuanian Haredi rabbis in Israel.[2]

By 2023, Hirsch was being discussed alongside Rabbi Dov Lando as a possible leading figure following the deaths of Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky and Rabbi Gershon Edelstein.[3] Leadership in the non-Hasidic Haredi, or Litvak, community did not involve an official heir comparable to the succession arrangements described for Hasidic communities.[3] Senior rabbis could exercise authority collectively or through a decentralized arrangement, and there was no agreed single successor.[3] Hirsch’s prominence therefore belonged to a wider leadership structure in which more than one senior rabbi could guide communal affairs.[3]

Hirsch became a senior spiritual figure in Degel HaTorah, the Lithuanian faction of the United Torah Judaism party, and a member of its Council of Torah Sages.[4] His standing brought him into decisions involving the faction’s relationship with the government, especially legislation concerning military service for Haredi men.[1] He and Lando were repeatedly identified together in connection with the community’s leadership and shared positions affecting Degel HaTorah’s political conduct.[3][1]

In 2024, Hirsch joined a delegation of prominent Lithuanian rabbis raising money in the United States for Haredi yeshivas facing reduced public funding.[5] The campaign sought $107 million for the Olam HaTorah Fund, and a campaign representative said that $60 million had been collected at the point described in the reporting.[5] Hirsch participated as head of Slabodka, linking his position in religious education with an effort to secure financial assistance from American Jewish donors.[5]

At a gathering in Lakewood, New Jersey, he recounted receiving a distressed telephone call from a yeshiva head who could not meet his institution’s expenses.[5] The caller cried that he had no way to pay, and Hirsch said that he had been unable to offer an answer at the time.[5] He presented American Jewish donors as people who might be able to help meet that need.[5] His appeal placed the campaign’s large financial target alongside the immediate difficulties of an individual yeshiva administrator.[5]

Hirsch’s public response to reductions in yeshiva funding also appeared in remarks at Slabodka about a High Court ruling concerning institutions with students eligible for military service.[6] He characterized the ruling as canceling, for the time being, the community’s right to study Torah in Israel.[6] He told his audience that preserving Torah study would require “self-sacrifice,” declaring, “We will need self-sacrifice for the Torah.”[6] In the same remarks, he asserted that some advocates of conscription were motivated by hostility to religion and Torah.[6]

His public position emphasized the religious contribution of yeshiva students, extending beyond their time spent studying texts.[7] In a recorded address to Haredi young men, he said that they worked on prayer, personal character, and acts of kindness as well as Torah study.[7] He argued that their closeness to God sustained the Land of Israel and that efforts to diminish the Torah world would bring destruction to the country.[7] He told his listeners, “You are allowed to be draft evaders; it is a mitzvah to be draft evaders.”[7]

In November 2024, Hirsch met young men who had received initial draft notices and urged them not to report for military service.[8] He blessed them to devote themselves to Torah and told them, “Do not be afraid – you are part of Olam Hatorah and have a higher calling.”[8] During the same period, he also met senior military officials to discuss Haredi enlistment.[8] His activity therefore included both direct encouragement to young men receiving notices and discussions with officials responsible for the military’s needs.[8]

Those contacts included meetings with senior Israeli military and security personnel, among them officials responsible for manpower, at a time when other rabbis were unwilling to meet them.[2][9] Hirsch read reports and documents and acknowledged the military’s manpower needs.[9] He repeatedly asked whether the military could make binding agreements with yeshivas or whether legal officials would ultimately have the final say.[9] His questions focused on the durability of proposed arrangements, not solely on their immediate terms.[9]

Concern that agreements could later be overturned contributed to his continued public opposition to enlistment.[9] He remained worried that military commitments intended to protect Haredi identity might not be upheld.[2] At the same time, he opposed confrontational protests and favored quieter action.[2] His dealings with officials consequently accompanied, rather than replaced, his public stance on preserving the religious commitments of the yeshiva community.[2][9]

Accounts of his individual guidance included exceptions to his general opposition to enlistment.[2] He sometimes advised people who struggled with yeshiva study to join a Haredi military track.[2] In one instance, two kollel students from Tiberias described dissatisfaction with their studies and financial hardship, and he permitted them to begin the enlistment process.[2] These decisions concerned particular individuals whose circumstances he considered, rather than a public instruction that yeshiva students generally should enlist.[2]

A separate account of an October 2024 private conversation with businessman and philanthropist David Hager presented another distinction in Hirsch’s position.[10] During the approximately forty-minute discussion, Hirsch expressed agreement that Haredi men engaged in secular employment or academic pursuits, rather than full-time religious study, should be subject to the draft.[10] He nevertheless maintained that religious students should remain exempt, including those unable to study throughout the entire day.[10] The distinction in that account was between participation in religious study and engagement in secular work or academic education.[10]

Hirsch also addressed relations between Haredi scholars and secular Israelis through the Jewish Connection organization, which arranges Torah study between the two groups.[11] He called shared study “a blessing” and said that a scholar could devote a tenth of his time to it.[11] He suggested inviting secular teenagers into Haredi homes so that they could encounter Jewish religious life and acts of kindness directly.[11] His advice combined study partnerships with opportunities to observe the everyday religious setting of the scholars involved.[11]

In that conversation, he generally advised against initiating discussions about military service with secular teenagers, saying that they would not understand the Haredi position.[11] If the subject arose, he recommended explaining that Torah study sustains the Jewish people and the State of Israel.[11] The explanation he proposed corresponded to the religious understanding expressed in his addresses to yeshiva students: Torah study was presented as a contribution to the continued life of the Jewish people and Israel.[7][11]

Hirsch’s involvement in conscription legislation included a lengthy telephone conversation in English with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.[12] They discussed the proposed legislation’s targets and provisions and the possibility of working together toward an agreed law.[12] His participation reflected his role as a spiritual leader of the Lithuanian Haredi public and his involvement in decisions affecting Degel HaTorah.[12] The conversation brought his religious leadership into direct contact with the prime minister over the details of a legislative proposal.[12]

In June 2025, Hirsch said that Degel HaTorah would probably leave the governing coalition soon if the government made no progress on legislation concerning Haredi military service.[1] His spokesperson said that the statement also represented Lando’s view.[1] The warning connected the faction’s continued participation in the coalition to action on an issue central to its religious leadership.[1] It also illustrated the shared role of Hirsch and Lando in communicating the expectations under which Degel HaTorah’s politicians operated.[1]

In November 2026, Degel HaTorah declined to recommend a candidate for prime minister during President Isaac Herzog’s consultations, following instructions from Hirsch and Lando.[13] The decision reflected a rift with Netanyahu’s outgoing coalition over its failure to pass legislation enshrining military-service exemptions for Haredi men.[13] Their instruction applied to the faction’s conduct in the presidential consultations, extending their influence beyond negotiations over the wording of a conscription law.[13]

Outside the conscription issue, Hirsch’s meeting with Ambassador Jack Lew addressed the security of Jewish life in the United States.[4] Hirsch said that antisemitism had previously been “on a low flame” and warned that conditions were moving back toward the 1930s.[4] Lew agreed that the danger required vigilance but said that he did not believe the United States was already returning to that period.[4] The exchange brought Hirsch’s memories of childhood antisemitism into a contemporary discussion with an American diplomatic representative.[4]

Hirsch’s contribution to the preservation of Aharon Kotler’s teaching began with recording lectures during his years as a close student and continued through helping edit the books based on them after Kotler’s death.[2] That work forms a connection between his early education at Lakewood and his later career as a teacher and head of Slabodka.[2] His students’ descriptions of continued preparation for general lectures likewise emphasize sustained engagement with sources and commentators throughout his teaching career.[2]

His influence in religious education also developed through consultations with other rabbis.[2] The discussion of “Making of a Godol” brought his understanding of American cultural life into a conversation with Steinman, after which further educational and public questions were referred to him.[2] His public standing therefore grew not only from his institutional position at Slabodka but also from the advice sought from him by other senior figures.[2]

Within the Lithuanian Haredi public, Hirsch’s leadership has been associated with Lando rather than with an uncontested claim to a single office of communal succession.[3][2] His membership in Degel HaTorah’s Council of Torah Sages and his involvement in instructions to the faction have given that religious standing a direct political expression.[1][4] His activities have also extended to raising funds for yeshivas in the United States and encouraging shared Torah study between Haredi scholars and secular Israelis.[5][11]

Across these activities, Hirsch has emphasized Torah study as both an educational undertaking and a source of support for Jewish collective life.[7][11] In addresses to Haredi students, he linked study with prayer, character, and kindness; in advice about encounters with secular Israelis, he encouraged study partnerships and visits to religious homes.[7][11] These settings show the range of audiences to which he has conveyed his understanding of the place of Torah study in the Jewish people and the State of Israel.[7][11]

Hirsch’s opposition to Haredi conscription places him within a significant Israeli dispute over military-service exemptions and the distribution of the defense burden.[1] Critics argue that exemptions are unfair to secular and religious-Zionist Israelis, while Hirsch presents Torah study as sustaining Israel.[1][7] His assertion that draft evasion could be a mitzvah expressed his position in particularly forceful terms.[7]

His public opposition has coexisted with meetings with military officials, acknowledgment of manpower needs, and permission for particular individuals to pursue enlistment.[2][9] The account that he supported drafting Haredi men in secular employment or academic study rested on a paraphrase of a private conversation with David Hager, not a direct transcript of Hirsch’s remarks.[10] That account should therefore be distinguished from his directly quoted public instructions to young men receiving draft notices and from decisions concerning individual students.[2][8]