הרב יהודה עמיטל

Rav Yehuda Amital (3 Cheshvan 5685/31 October 1924–27 Tammuz 5770/9 July 2010), born Yehuda Klein, was the founding rosh yeshiva of Yeshivat Har Etzion and a minister in the Israeli government. He was born in Grosswardein (Oradea) in Romania to Yekutiel Ze’ev and Devora Klein. As a boy he learned in the yeshiva founded in his native city by Rav Chaim Yehuda Levi, who had brought the Lithuanian way of learning back to Hungary from Mir.

After the Nazis took hold of Hungary his whole family was deported to Auschwitz and murdered there; he himself was taken to a forced-labor camp, and it was this that kept him alive. He was held some eight months, until the camp was freed by the Soviet army on Simchat Torah 5705/4 October 1944. He made his way to Bucharest and from there to Eretz Yisrael, arriving in Chanukah 5705, and after a short stay at Atlit he came to Yerushalayim. There he learned in the Chevron yeshiva and received semicha from Rav Isser Zalman Meltzer, and heard shiurim from Rav Yaakov Moshe Charlap. He served for a time in the Haganah, then moved to the Kletzk yeshiva, then in Pardes Chana, where he married Miriam, daughter of the rosh yeshiva Rav Zvi Yehuda Meltzer.

The day after the declaration of the State his unit was mobilized, and he fought at Latrun and in the western Galil; he set down what he lived through as a soldier in an essay on the way of the religious soldier in that war. After the war he served in the beit din of Rechovot, and then became a maggid shiur at Yeshivat HaDarom, where he conceived the idea of the hesder yeshiva — a program joining army service with Torah learning — and had an active hand in establishing the first of them; among his talmidim there was Rav Zvi Yisrael Tau. In 1991 the hesder program was awarded the Israel Prize.

After the Six-Day War he was asked by the men who had conceived Yeshivat Har Etzion in Gush Etzion to head it; it opened in Kfar Etzion in 1968 with thirty talmidim and moved two years later to Alon Shvut, and he stood at its head for forty years, inviting Rav Aharon Lichtenstein to join him in 1971. In 1988 he was among the founders of the Meimad movement; when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in November 1995 he was brought into Shimon Peres’s government as a minister without portfolio, with the aim of bridging the tension that had opened between the religious and the secular. At the end of 5768/2008 he retired from the yeshiva. He left HaMaalot MiMaamakim (5734), talks he gave during the Yom Kippur War and after it; V’HaAretz Natan Livnei Adam (5764); and Resisei Tal, chiddushim and berurim in halacha. He was niftar on 27 Tammuz 5770 (2010) and was buried on Har HaMenuchot in Yerushalayim.