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Rabbi Shmuel Mohilever ל”צז (PHOTO: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS)

Commemorating the 125th Yahrzeit of the

Forefather of the Mizrachi Movement

Rabbi Elie Mischel

hen Rabbi Shmuel Mohi- Mohilever was soon recognized as a child work for the resettlement of Eretz Yisrael.
lever passed away 125 prodigy and brilliant young Torah scholar. Inspired by Rav Zvi Hirsch Kalischer’s
years ago on the 19th of He married at fifteen and studied at the groundbreaking Religious Zionist work,
WSivan, 1898, he left the famed Volozhin Yeshiva, where he was Derishat Zion (1862), Rav Mohilever began
world with the satisfaction of know- later ordained at the age of eighteen. writing for the Hebrew-language weekly
ing that his life’s work had not been in HaMagid. Like Rav Kalischer, Rav Mohi-
vain. Among the founders of the Chibbat Initially, Rav Mohilever refused to prac- lever discerned Hashem’s hand in his
Zion movement and one of the spiritual tice as a rabbi, working as a flax mer- generation, sensing that the world was
fathers of Religious Zionism, Rav Mohi- chant for five years. But the death of his experiencing the early stirrings of the
lever planted the seeds that would later wealthy in-laws and business reversals Messianic era.
compelled him to enter the rabbinate in
flower and become the Mizrachi move- his home village. In the decades to follow, In early 1881, shortly before he was
ment founded by Rabbi Yitzchak Ya’akov Rav Mohilever would serve as the rabbi elected as the rabbi in Bialystok, horrific
Reines.
of ever larger Jewish communities. In pogroms in Kiev and other cities through-
Born in 1824 in Glubokoye, a village in 1868, he moved to Radom, in modern-day out Imperial Russia pushed Rav Mohile-
northern Belarus not far from Vilna, Rav Poland, where he first began to actively ver and other early Zionists to act. When

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