Our Sages teach that the Children of Israel were redeemed from Egypt by merit of the righteous women of that generation who strove to continue to bring forth children, regardless of the grueling servitude and despite Pharaoh's decree that the male children be killed. Certainly, in our time, one of the righteous women who led Israel’s ongoing Redemption was Miriam Levinger, wife of Rabbi Moshe Levinger, one of the leaders of the Gush Emunim smovement to build Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria after the Six Day War.
Rabbanit Levinger passed away five years ago at the age of 83, mother of eleven children and fifty grandchildren. Often termed the “Mother of the Settlement Movement,” she joined her pioneering husband for the famous Pesach Seder in the Hevron Park Hotel in 1968 which eventually led to the renewed Jewish settlement of the City of the Patriarchs. That transpired a decade later when she determinedly led a group of women and children into the then abandoned Beit Hadassah Clinic, remaining there until the Israeli Government agreed that Jews could reside, not only in nearby Kiriat Arba, but in the City of the Patriarchs as well.
Before her death, I spoke to her about that first Pesach night in Hevron.
“My husband told me to pack enough clothes for two weeks, along with our refrigerator and stove.”
“Where are we going?” Rabbanit Levinger asked him.
“Hevron,” he said.
“Tomorrow night starts Pesach,” she reminded him.
“That’s where we are spending the holiday,” he informed her.
Rabbinit Levinger, of blessed memory, said she obeyed his request without further question. Her husband had driven her to Hevron two weeks earlier to survey the Park Hotel where they would be staying. The following morning, a truck arrived at the Nechalim moshav near Petach Tikva where Rabbi Moshe Levinger, of blessed memory, served as the religious community’s Rabbi.
His Bronx-born wife herded their four young children into the vehicle while helpers loaded their suitcases, refrigerator, and stove onto the vehicle. Her husband sat next to the driver. “We stopped again and again on the way,” she related, “to pick up other young families and yeshiva students who my husband had invited for the holiday. A good many of them weren’t religious – good Jews like the pioneer chalutzim of old with a passionate love for Eretz Yisrael.”
The year was 1968, only a year after Hevron was recaptured by the IDF during the Six Day War. “White flags of surrender still hung from many of the windows in the city,” Rabbinit Levinger recalled. “It was all very thrilling. Everyone had the feeling that we were taking part in a great moment of Jewish history. Seeing the Tomb of the Patriarchs, and knowing this was where everything began, was a high point of my life. When we reached the Park Hotel, which my husband had rented out for the duration of the holiday, a group of women were already at work koshering in kitchen. Others were setting up the ornate dining room which had leather sofas fit for the wealthy sheiks who visited the hotel from Saudi Arabia. I started to help with the cooking. I didn’t ask questions. I didn’t have time. The Seder was only a few hours away and I trusted that my husband knew what he was doing.”
Rabbi Levinger knew what he was doing, but he didn’t know how the adventure was going to end. After Israel’s great victory in the Six Day War, with the recapture of Jerusalem and the heartland of Biblical Israel, many people spoke about the need to resettle the ancient cities and hillsides of Judea and Samaria where the kings and prophets of Israel had dwelled, but no one knew how to go about it.
The first settlement had started a few months earlier in Kfar Etzion, where Arabs had massacred 157 Jews during Israel’s War of Independence, razing the agricultural village to the ground. Leading the return was a young student at the Mercaz HaRav Kook Yeshiva in Jerusalem, Hanan Porat, of blessed memory, who had lived in Kfar Etzion as a child. After helping Porat establish a pioneer group on the site, Rabbi Levinger decided that Hevron, the City of the Nation’s Forefathers, and the initial capital of King David, had to be next.
I met Rabbanit Levinger almost 40 years ago on my first visit to Hevron as a guest for Shabbat at the Levinger home. Previously that year, while working for the Israel Aliyah Center in Manhattan, I had met HaRav Levinger and written public-relations articles about his visit to America on behalf of his “Mivtzah Elef Project” to bring Jewish families on Aliyah to Judea and Samaria. Accompanying him were a spirited group of shlichim, representatives, including Yechiel Leiter, current Israel Ambassador to the United States, Era Rappaport, the mayor of Shilo, Yaacov Sternberg, Rabbi Yigal Kutai, and Rabbi’s Eliezer Waldman and Benny Alon, of blessed memory.
The following year, largely because of the great spirit of pioneering idealism which they brought to New York, some 3,800 new olim made Aliyah from North America. This was 20 years before the establishment of Nefesh B’Nefesh and the start-up explosion and miraculous economic growth in Israel. This burst of olim was only matched 40 years later in the wake of the Coronvirus scare.
When I got off the bus in Hevron for my first Shabbat in the ancient city, a friendly Jewish settler led me to the Levinger home in the rubbles of the Avraham Avinu neighborhood, long before its modern renovation. The Arabs had used the surrounding yard for a sheep pen. Rav Moshe was wearing a large tallit katan, polishing his shoes, sitting on the stone steps leading to the second-story flat. At the time, I was a budding baal t’shuva, barely acquainted with Orthodox Jewish life in New York, and to my very American eyes, he looked like a Biblical prophet. Smiling broadly and rising to give me a powerful bear hug, he apologized for having to finish polishing his shoes in honor of Shabbat. Calling to one of his sons in his hoarse, throaty voice, he said, “Ephraim, come greet Tzvi Fishman, the baal t’shuva from Hollywood who helped us in New York. Ask Ema to give him some cake and show him to his room.” Rabbanit Levinger was in the kitchen preparing chulent. She stopped her work and greeted me with great hospitality. She wore an apron, and her head was completely swathed in a white covering, making her look like a nurse. “Welcome!” she said in a clear Bronx English. “Baruch Haba. Sit down. Have some cake and some juice. You can stay with us in Hevron as long as you like. Thank you for helping with ‘Mivtzah Elef.’ We have to bring all the Jews we can to Israel, bezrat Hashem, as fast as we can. So many are assimilating! May Heaven have mercy.”
HaRav Shlomo Aviner took part in the first Pesach Seder in Hevron, its meal cooked by Rabbanit Levinger and other pioneer women. The city had been Judenrein ever since the murderous Arab Pogrom of 1929 forced the surviving Jews to leave the Jewish city. “Rabbanit Levinger was an extremely modest woman and yet a stalwart activist for Jewish sovereignty over Eretz Yisrael,” he said. “She was a woman filled with a towering ideology, a woman of principle who refused all compromise, a person of unwavering truth, which is the noblest of traits, a woman of great stature, not in holding herself above other women, but in being an inspiration for women and for men alike.”
Meir Indor worked side-by-side with HaRav Levinger from the beginnings of Gush Emunim. “If you told the Rabbanit that she was the ‘First Lady of the Settlement Movement,’ she would have laughed and modestly replied, ‘Sure. I brought the first Jewish refrigerator to Hevron.’ The Levinger home was always filled with guests, and Miriam always had warm soup ready to serve in the winter, and refreshing drinks in the summer. In the literally hundreds of conversations I had with her over the years, there was never any small talk. She could joke about the many crazy and frustrating experiences they had during their years of hardship and struggle, but the conversation was always about the things that we needed to do to push and to pull the wagon of Israel’s Redemption forward. But she didn’t rely on talk – she acted. Just as righteous women redeemed Am Yisrael from Mitzrayim,
Miriam Levinger and the group of women who squatted for a year in Beit Hadassah, redeemed Hevron. She did the same thing in the Tomb of Rachel until Jews were allowed to pray there, to join in with the prayers of our matriarch Rachel until HaKodesh Baruch Hu returned all of our scattered people to Eretz Yisrael.”
An old friend from New York related: “Miriam made aliyah in 1956. She came to Bnei Akiva at age 15, at our Ken Mizracha branch in the East Bronx, and immediately became an ardent member. She was the youngest of six children. Her father was a Hazzan and wrote music for Hazzanim. He was a true free spirit and Miriam inherited that characteristic from him. At Hunter High School in Manhattan, a public school for girl students with high IQ’s, she was one of the few observant Jews. Before eating the sandwich she brought from home, she would go to do netilat yadayim. She wasn’t embarrassed to be a religious Jew in front of the other girls. Unlike many other members of Bnei Akiva, she made aliya straight out of high school, rather than studying in New York, even though she had no relatives in Israel.”
Rabbanit Libby Kahane remembers: “Miriam registered to study nursing at the old Shaarei Tzedek Hospital, which had a dorm, when she arrived in Israel. The studies were in Hebrew, and she was just learning the language, but she was determined to work hard to pass the written tests, and she did.”
Continuing with the story of that first Seder Night in Hevron, Rabbanit Levinger told me: “My husband went to the Minister of Transportation at the time, Yigal Alon, who was a friend, to ask for his advice on how to obtain the Government’s permission to resettle Hevron. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol didn’t know what to do with all of the reclaimed territory that had fallen into our hands upon Israel’s victory in the war, and the Defense Minister, Moshe Dayan, was prepared to return it all to the Arabs in exchange for a genuine commitment to peace. Alon told my husband that when it came to settling the Land of Israel, first you establish the facts on the ground and then you inform the authorities, and that’s exactly what we did.”
Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, who also showed up for the Seder in Hevron, told the Jewish Press that a fellow student at Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva asked him if he wanted to learn for time at a yeshiva in Hevron. “I asked the Rosh Yeshiva, HaRav Tzvi Yehuda Kook, what he thought of the idea, and he said, why not? I didn’t know at the time that Rabbi Levinger had consulted with Rabbi Kook from the beginning. The plan was to stay in the hotel after the Pesach holiday and thus initiate the renewed Jewish settlement of Hevron since its forced evacuation in 1929, after the Arabs slaughtered 67 men, women, and children, and wounded a hundred more, completely erasing the Jewish community which had continued in the city almost uninterrupted for almost 2000 years.”
“Students from Hebrew University were also a part of the gathering,” Miriam Levinger recalled. “Two of them stood guard on the roof of the hotel – Ehud Olmert and Dan Meridor, long before they changed their political ideologies and stripes. Years later, I happened to meet another one of the Hebrew University students who shared the Seder with us – Gideon Ezra, the Minister of Internal Security and a former head of the Shabak. When I asked him why he joined us in Hevron that very first Pesach, he said the Shabak had sent him. Some things don’t seem to change. Baruch Hashem, we have scores of Jewish families living in Hevron today, and, no doubt, no small number of Shabaknikim among them.”
Elyakim HaEtzni, of blessed memory, an attorney who represented the settlement movement ever since their return to Hevron, and a former Knesset member of the Techiya Party, noted that many secular Israelis took part in the Park Hotel Seder. “I wasn’t the only fellow who didn’t wear a kippah. Months before, just after the Six Day War, I had met Rabbi Levinger at a meeting for activists who wanted to see Jews begin to settle the areas conquered in the war. I lived in Ramat Gan at the time and the encounter with Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook’s students was an ideological revolution for me. I thought I was a devout proponent of Greater Eretz Yisrael Movement, but these energetic fellows had some kind of unworldly spirit and faith that didn’t understand the word no. For them, nothing was impossible. I was totally swept up in their whirlwind. I’ve never been one to cover my head with a kippah, and suddenly I found myself surrounded by a sea of kippot and tzitzit. I’m still not religious in the same way as they are, but I live in Kiriat Arba, and wouldn’t move if you paid me.
“I came with my late wife and mother, and our four young children. Accustomed to the secular culture of Tel Aviv, we felt like we had stepped into a movie about some other planet. Young families showed up lugging refrigerators and all of their belongings as if they had really come home. Their sense of confidence was staggering. They were possessed by an inner light which I had never seen before.
The Arab owner of the establishment was just as amazed as I was. He thought he had rented all of the rooms in the hotel from a group of tourists from Switzerland, and here come these tziztit-wearing Gush Emunim types, carrying refrigerators and stoves, and hammering mezuzahs on doorposts as if the building belonged to them.
“The joy was amazing. Rabbi Haim Drukman conducted the Seder and led the reading from the Haggadah. The glow on people’s faces seemed brighter than the chandeliers. I’m sure the entire neighborhood could hear our singing. In the middle of the meal, we received word that two army patrol jeeps had arrived. I thought that was the end of our great scheme, but Rabbi Levinger went outside to greet them, and he invited the soldiers to join the festivities. At three-o’clock, after the Seder ended, we all danced in the street, settlers and soldiers together. With the dark buildings of Hevron all around us, and the full moon lighting up our celebration, we all shared the feeling that this holy night was history in the making.”
I asked Rabbanit Levinger if she felt vulnerable surrounded by a city filled with Arabs?
“Yes and no,” she answered. “In those days, the Arabs were afraid of us. In the Six Day War, we conquered Hevron without having to fire a shot. Still, it wasn’t a secret that knife-wielding Arabs still attacked Jews. But they didn’t have the arrogance that they have toward us today, now that the leftist media, and leftist peace groups, and the Supreme Court, and the Jewish Division of the Shabak watch every move we make. In the morning, when the men danced through the streets wearing tallit on the way to Maharat HaMachpela to pray, the Arabs hurried to get out of our way.
“My husband informed me that until we were evicted from the hotel, it was going to be our new home,” Rabbinit Levinger recounted. “At first I thought the idea of living amongst the Arabs was crazy, but during the holiday I got used to it. Back at our moshav, people were starting to build big houses and talk about driveways for their cars and comfortable salons alongside their dining rooms. In moving to Israel from America, I always longed for the idealism of the original pioneers who built the country. Here was the perfect chance I realized. Moshe said that just like the motto of our soldiers was ‘Kedima!’ – ‘forward!’ – we had to keep going forward in settling Judea and Samaria.
Rabbi Eliezer Waldman, of blessed memory, also was present at the history-making Seder. Born in Petach Tikva, his family moved to America when he was three. After studying at Brooklyn College, Toraah Vadaat yeshiva, and Yeshiva University, Rabbi Waldman returned to Israel to study at the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva. In 1972, he founded the Kiriat Arba Nir Yeshiva with Rabbi Levinger
“To my recollection, during Chol HaMoed,” Rabbanit Levinger recalled, “the mayor of Hevron stopped by to see what all the celebration was about. At my husband’s initial meeting with him at his home, he had been very cordial, but now Jews from all over the country flocked to the hotel day and night to express their joy and support for our efforts, and the local Arab leadership began to worry about the sudden surge of Israelis in the town. He made it clear that they expected us to leave after our vacation was over. Smiling, and in his soft-spoken manner, Rabbi Waldman told him that we would be staying in the city with his blessings or not. ‘After all,’ the young Torah scholar said, ‘We lived in Hevron before you did.’”
Miriam Levinger said that it didn’t take long for the word to spread about the "settlers" In Hevron, and several critical articles appeared in the leading newspapers, all of them the voice boxes of the Left. “I think a part of their anger against us, both then and today, stems from the fact that we took over the pioneer spirit which led them to build the country in the early days of the Yishuv, but which they abandoned for office jobs and the good life in Tel Aviv.”
Briefly, she summed up that first holiday incursion in Hevron:
“We stayed in the hotel for a few weeks. With growing pressure from the Arabs and leftist media, the Government didn’t know what to do. They came up with a plan to move us to a building in the compound of the Army Authority in Hevron. I think they figured that after a while we all would pack up our bags and return to our homes, but we held our ground until the Government agreed to build the settlement of Kiriat Arba up the hill from Hevron. Still, my husband and others stubbornly refused to abandon the city of our patriarchs and matriarchs, and with the help of the Rabonu Shel Olam, we are still here today in Hevron, along with scores of other families.”
I remarked that she must certainly feel a sense of great satisfaction for the success of their efforts, seeing how new settlements had been established all over the country in wake of that first Seder Night in Hevron.
“In the last years of my husband’s life, he said that while we succeeded in building new yishuvim throughout Judea and Samaria, the Golan, and Gush Katif, we had not succeeded in explaining the loftiness of the settlement enterprise, not to the nations of the world, not to a large segment of the Jewish People, and not to many of the settlers themselves. That’s why we lost the battle to save the settlements in Gush Katif.
"My husband said that if the buildings in New York City reach lofty heights, they are miniscule compared to the buildings of the Land of Israel, which are ladders reaching up to Heaven. He came to the conclusion that explaining the importance of the settlements to the security of the country was not a deep enough strategy, because many people in Israel and abroad believe our security can be insured by giving up the Jewish communities for peace. Therefore, Rabbi Levinger said we have to strive harder to teach people the Divine importance of the settlement of Eretz Yisrael, for the betterment of all of the world, in its being the vessel that houses Hashem’s blessing on Earth.”
“Little by little,” Rabbi Shlomo Aviner adds. “The song ‘Dayenu’ in the Pesach Haggadah teaches us to be thankful for what we have. Of course Eretz Yisrael is not complete without the Beit HaMikdash. And of course the miracle at the Red Sea would be far less significant if we had not received the Torah. By saying, ‘Dayenu,’ we don’t mean that we don’t need each subsequent step in our Redemption, but that we are grateful in the meantime for all that Hashem has given us. So too with the settlement movement and Medinat Yisrael. Of course we want more and more communities, and we yearn for the Beit HaMikdash, but on Seder Night we say, ‘Dayenu,’ very thankful for what Hashem has granted us up till now.”