‘In the Eye of the Storm: The Public Persona and Torah Work of Rabbi Shlomo Goren in the Years 1948-1994’

This is Shifra Mishloff’s 2010 Bar-Ilan doctoral dissertation consisting of 265 pages in Hebrew, submitted Tammuz 5770, advised by Prof. Meir Hildesheimer of the Kushitzky Department of Jewish History. From the acknowledgements, Mishloff got access to Goren’s (1917-1994) personal archive through his son Rami Goren and grandchildren David Goren and Irit Shapira-Meir. She also interviewed Goren’s inner circle, including Rav Yisrael Ariel, Rav Tzefaniah Drori, Rav Yosef Hadana, Rav Menachem HaKohen, Rav Yossi Harel, Rav Shear Yashuv Cohen, Rav Eli Sadan, Prof. Yaakov Neeman, Hanan Porat, and Rav Mordechai Piron.
The structure tracks R. Shlomo Goren’s three major posts. First, Chief Rabbi of the IDF from 1948 to 1971. Then a brief tenure as Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv-Jaffa starting in 1968, after his 1964 loss for the national job. Then Chief Rabbi of Israel from 1972 to 1983. Thematic sections follow on his halakhic positions and his relations with the religious-Zionist world, with diaspora rabbis (the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994), Joseph Soloveitchik (1903-1993), Saul Lieberman (1898-1983), Immanuel Jakobovits (1921-1999)), and with world leaders.
Rabbi Shlomo Goren sat at the intersection of every coalitional fault line in Israeli religious life: state versus Haredi world, IDF versus rabbinate, religious Zionism versus Mizrachi politics, his own halakhic ambitions versus the political establishment. The Langer mamzer ruling of 1972 broke him with the Haredi camp. His opposition to the 1974 Law of Return compromise broke him with the political establishment. The 1980 ten-year tenure cap pushed him out. His feud with Rabbi Ovadia Yosef (1920-2013) ran the entire period. He died bitter that he could not realize his vision.
Mishloff describes a man whose insider authority rested on coalitions he kept rupturing. His shofar blast at the Kotel in 1967 became the defining hero-system image of religious Zionism, and the rest of his career consisted of cashing in that capital and watching it burn. Goren was another credentialed insider who pressed his case past the point his coalition could absorb, and paid for it.
Four episodes sit at the center of Mishloff’s account.
The Langer mamzer ruling came first and broke everything. The brother and sister, Hanoch and Miriam Langer, were declared mamzerim because their mother had earlier married a Polish convert named Borokovsky whose conversion was held valid. The Petah Tikvah court ruled them mamzerim. The Supreme Rabbinical Court of Appeals upheld it in 1970, with Yosef Shalom Elyashiv (1910-2012) writing the majority opinion that Borokovsky’s conversion held because he behaved like a Jew. Goren argued in the appeals court for permitting them and lost. Moshe Dayan (1915-1981), to whom the siblings appealed, leaned on Goren in 1971. Goren produced an opinion saying Borokovsky’s conversion was invalid in the first place, and that he had revoked it by returning to Christianity. Sitting chief rabbi Yitzhak Nissim (1896-1981) could not assemble a court to apply that opinion. Golda Meir (1898-1978) asked the siblings to wait for the next election. They waited.
Within weeks of his election Goren convened a special court of nine dayanim whose names he kept secret to protect them. On November 19, 1972 they permitted the siblings to marry. Goren had already arranged the weddings for the same day and paid for them himself. Rav Mordechai Piron (1921-2014), his successor at the IDF rabbinate, conducted one of the chuppot. The Haredi world detonated. MK Shlomo Lorincz (1918-2009) of Agudat Yisrael told the Knesset: we no longer recognize Goren as chief rabbi and we will not accept his rulings. Rav Elazar Menachem Shach (1899-2001) declared from Bnei Brak that Goren was no longer a rabbi, his rulings were not rulings, his hechsherim could not be eaten, and he was placed outside the camp. Posters voiding his rulings carried the signatures of Rav Yaakov Yisrael Kanievsky the Steipler (1899-1985), Rav Yechezkel Abramsky (1886-1976), Elyashiv, Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach (1910-1995), and the heads of Hebron and Mir. Elyashiv resigned from the Supreme Rabbinical Court in protest and led the campaign against Goren from then on.
Mishloff calls Langer the opening shot. From this point Goren’s halakhic standing in the Haredi world is finished.
The Who-Is-a-Jew fight came next. After the Yom Kippur war and the December 1973 election, Mafdal had to decide whether to enter Rabin’s coalition without an amendment to the Law of Return specifying conversion according to halakhah. The Mafdal Young Guard under Zevulun Hammer (1936-1998) and Yehuda Ben-Meir (b. 1939) wanted to hold out. The old guard wanted to enter. They asked Goren. He brought it to the council, called Joseph Soloveitchik (1903-1993) in Boston for advice, and ruled that Mafdal could not join without an immediate amendment. Soloveitchik told him on the phone that yielding would destroy Mizrachi in America. Pinhas Sapir (1906-1975), Goren’s friend of 27 years, called Goren in fury: how could he take a decision that would breed hatred and destroy religion? The Mafdal old guard, Yosef Burg (1909-1999), Michael Hazani (1913-1975), and Yitzhak Raphael (1914-1999), joined the coalition anyway, defying the ruling. Goren said the rabbinate had been struck down by the very men who built it. Tzvi Yehuda Kook (1891-1982) backed him publicly and called the new government a desecration of the Name. The Mafdal old guard never forgave him. From 1974 onward, removing him was their priority.
So: 1972 cost him the Haredi world. 1974 cost him the political establishment that had elected him. He had been chief rabbi two years.
Ovadia Yosef (1920-2013) had been a friend before 1972. He congratulated Goren on his Israel Prize in 1961 and called him “my friend and dear one.” They cooperated in the Tel Aviv chief rabbinate. Then Langer broke it. Yosef sat on the appeals panel that had refused to permit the siblings, opposed Goren’s special court, and after first accepting the ruling withdrew approval under Haredi pressure. He claimed his signature on Hanoch Langer’s marriage certificate had been slipped in among the hundreds he signs each week. Within weeks the Haredi rabbinic leadership around Elyashiv, Auerbach, Avraham Shapira (1914-2007), and Ben-Zion Abba Shaul (1924-1998) began meeting at Yosef’s home to coordinate against Goren. They formed a “Sephardic Rabbis Organization” as a parallel body to the Chief Rabbinate Council, with Yosef at its head.
Mishloff’s structural reading is sharp. Both rabbis used kohach d’hetera, the principle that lenient rulings carry more authority. But Goren used it for the state. Yosef used it for individuals returning to tradition. They had no shared frame for resolving disputes because their projects were different. Goren wanted a religious-Zionist halakhah for a sovereign Jewish state. Yosef wanted a Sephardic revival under traditional authority. Personal relations warmed in the last joint years, but they never collaborated again.
The Temple Mount story Mishloff tells is more equivocal than the legend. Uzi Narkiss (1925-1997), the central command general, claimed years later that Goren on June 7, 1967, after the Kotel ceremony, returned to the mount and tried to talk him into bombing the mosques. “Rabbi, stop. If you don’t stop, I’ll take you out of here to prison.” Narkiss published this only after Goren died. Goren’s own book Har HaBayit tells it differently: an air force commander asked him why the mount could not be cleared, and Goren answered that doing so might have triggered immediate war with the Muslim world. Both can be true within the same hour. Either way, Goren ran to the Kotel and the mount was lost. He spent the rest of his life writing on it and arguing for Jewish prayer there, and he failed. Hebron and the Cave of the Patriarchs went the other way. He fought Dayan and won. Jewish prayer became possible.
The 1980 Chief Rabbinate Law capped tenures at ten years with no re-election. Begin and the Mafdal Young Guard backed Goren. The old guard, including Burg, opposed any change. Religious Affairs Minister Aharon Abu-Hatzeira (b. 1938) drove the law through. Hammer eventually joined the opposition. Agudat Yisrael preferred to lose Yosef’s reappointment, whom they backed, rather than permit Goren’s. Goren threatened to launch a rival party named Degel Yerushalayim, the name of Rav Kook’s earlier movement. Nothing came of it. His personal secretary Zalman Koitner described his last years as survival-level administration: keeping the rabbinate’s state standing while doing nothing more. He was forced out in April 1983.
The frame is in the title. Goren stood in the eye of the storm. A man whose authority rested on coalitions that detested each other and who acted as if they did not. The Haredi world wanted halakhah unconstrained by state interest. The political establishment wanted halakhah subordinate to coalition arithmetic. The religious Zionists wanted halakhah that built the state. He could not satisfy all three, and the moment he chose the third he lost the other two.
This dissertation adds three things to my knowledge of R. Goren.
First, the archive. Mishloff had access to Goren’s personal archive (Arkhion Rav Goren) through his son Rami and grandchildren, plus the Israel State Archives. Marc Shapiro and the Haredi-skeptic literature work from published responsa, newspaper coverage, and secondhand accounts. Mishloff has the letters, the council protocols, the recorded lectures, the private correspondence with Joseph Soloveitchik (1903-1993), Ovadia Yosef (1920-2013), Mafdal leadership, and the diaspora rabbinate. Several scenes the secondary literature treats as legend are documents in her footnotes. The phone call with Soloveitchik on the Law of Return, where Soloveitchik told Goren not to yield because Mafdal yielding would destroy Mizrachi in America, exists as a written protocol in the Goren archive. The Pinhas Sapir (1906-1975) furious phone call (“I have been your friend for 27 years, how can you take a decision that would breed hatred”) gets dated and contextualized through the council records.
A caveat that follows from the archival access: Mishloff is sympathetic to Goren. The family granted access. Her account has a slight family-friendly tilt. When she presents conflicting versions of an event, like Uzi Narkiss (1925-1997) versus Goren on the Temple Mount, she lets both stand but the framing favors Goren’s version. Read her against Narkiss, against Yair Halevy’s caveats, and against your existing notes from Marc Shapiro on the halakhic substance.
Second, the Goren-Yosef story is more textured than my initial draft of the Proxy Rabbi essay had it. They were friends before Langer. Yosef wrote Goren a warm letter in 1961 congratulating him on the Israel Prize, calling him “my friend and dear one, the great Gaon famous to the four corners of the earth,” and asking Goren to send him notes on Yabia Omer. They cooperated as joint Tel Aviv chief rabbis from 1968 to 1972. After Langer, Yosef’s first public response was to accept the ruling and refuse to denounce it. He sat with Goren in a public reconciliation meeting and issued a statement condemning the violence against Goren. Only after weeks of Haredi pressure did Yosef withdraw, then claim his signature on Hanoch Langer’s marriage certificate had been slipped in among the hundreds he signs each week. The Sephardic Haredi infrastructure around Yosef (Elyashiv, Auerbach, Avraham Shapira, Ben Zion Abba Shaul (1924-1998)) coalesced to keep him on their side. Even so, Yosef sat as mesader kiddushin at the wedding of Goren’s son Rami in 1982, and the two exchanged warm holiday letters until the end. The break was coalitional. The friendship was real. Both are documented in the same archive.
Alliance Theory predicts opposition between Goren and Yosef from the structural starting position. Mishloff shows it took two years of constant Haredi work to make it stick. Coalitions do not produce opposition automatically. They produce opposition by overriding existing relationships. Coalitions force agents with cross-coalition friendships to pick a side. Yosef picked his coalition over his friend because the cost of not picking was career-ending. That sharpens the analytical point rather than blunting it. The essay can absorb the friendship and come out stronger: even genuine friendship across coalition lines does not survive sustained pressure from the dominant coalition.
Third, these items:
The 1962 Temple Mount lecture. Five years before the Six Day War, at a Torah She’Be’al Peh conference, Goren told the audience that when the Mount is liberated it might be necessary to determine the precise location of the Temple. Reported in Haaretz, August 15, 1962. Goren was not improvising in 1967. He had been thinking about Temple reconstruction as an operational possibility for years.
The Hebron win. Goren fought Defense Minister Moshe Dayan (1915-1981) over Jewish prayer at the Cave of the Patriarchs and won. Jewish prayer became possible there. The Mount was lost to Dayan’s order on June 7 1967 to lower the Israeli flag and hand security back to the Muslims. Mishloff treats Goren’s holy-sites record as mixed, not maximalist throughout. He won the battle he could win and lost the one he could not.
The 1980 legislative mechanics. Religious Affairs Minister Aharon Abu-Hatzeira (b. 1938) drove the ten-year tenure cap. Begin and the Mafdal Young Guard backed Goren but the Mafdal old guard around Yosef Burg (1909-1999) opposed any change. Zevulun Hammer (1936-1998) flipped to the opposition late. Agudat Yisrael preferred to lose Yosef’s reappointment, whom they backed, rather than permit Goren’s. The law passed in March 1980 and took effect in September. Goren threatened to launch a rival party named Degel Yerushalayim, the name Avraham Yitzhak HaKohen Kook (1865-1935) had used for his earlier movement. Nothing came of it.
The Koitner testimony. Goren’s personal secretary Zalman Koitner described the last years to Mishloff as survival-level administration: holding the rabbinate’s state status while doing nothing more. Inside-the-office testimony.
The Greenzweig incident. February 1983. Goren spoke at the funeral of Emil Greenzweig (1948-1983), the Peace Now activist killed at a left-wing demonstration. Goren read the egla arufa passage. When he reached “our hands did not shed this blood” parts of the crowd shouted back “your hands shed this blood.” Greenzweig’s mother silenced them. Goren stood there, two months from forced retirement, both the official voice of religious Israel and a marked man for the secular left. The picture of a man whose hero-system capital had run out from both directions.