Yated Ne'eman (Israel) - Anti-Zionism

Anti-Zionism

• "pure viewpoints ... particularly his censure of Zionism ... the honest view of Torah even when he knew that it would invite attacks and condemnation. He was outspoken against evolution, Zionism, ... He demonstrated the dark side and intellectual paucity of the eastern religions, psychology, Islam, Catholic and Protestant Christianity, Zionism, and Communism. ... He was a master at finding the appropriate way to dismiss those who possessed wrong views and show through the veneer of respectability from them. Evolutionists were "theorists"; inventors of other religions, Bible critics, Reform, Maskilim, and Zionists were "falsifiers" "substituters" "imitators" "idolaters" and "usurpers." He explained simply and easily the falseness underlying all these ideologies."
• "Boruch Hashem, there is virtually no heresy nowadays. Before the Second World War, thousands of Yidden veered off the Torah path because of Zionism, Communism and other – "isms." Today Communism and Socialism are no longer thought compelling, while Zionism has become emptied of all content and we hope will disappear completely, be'ezras Hashem."
• "The youth that we encounter on the streets are empty of any spiritual content. They pursue drugs and robbery. They lack any shred of Jewish identity and are targets for missionaries who stalk them. This is what the Zionists have wrought with their decrees against the numerous holy communities, who returned from their countries of exile, where even the simplest among them had been separated from the surrounding gentiles by the Torah's hedge of roses. Let us heed this lesson and reckon what the dangers to ourselves would be, to our spirits and to our educational institutions, Hashem yeracheim, were we to find the State pleasant. We must be on our guard against any new suspicion that this might become the case."
• "HaRav Hakodosh R' Elchonon Wasserman ztvk'l, Hy'd wrote in 5682 (1922), that is, eighty-two years ago, "An Open Letter to the Rabbis of Mizrachi" (published in Der Yid, Warsaw, and reprinted in Kovetz Maamorim veIgoros, p. 210). In it he presents some acute questions: "It is known and clear to us all that the heads and leaders of Zionism are apostates to the hilt and, according to daas Torah, it is forbidden to join them even for holy purposes. If so, explain to me, my worthy friends, where have you found within the Torah any heter to openly, brazenly join forces with them?" .... the core and beginning of their sin lies in the fact that the founders of Zionism "established as their goal to eradicate Hashem's Torah from Jewry." This is the fulcrum of the corruption and damage and distortion. .... The Mizrachi people have become trapped, despite all the warnings, in the terrible error that Zionism is the beginning of a New Judaism. They failed to understand that Zionism is the end of the ancient Judaism, a dead end, as the Zionist writer, Haim Hazaz, himself wrote: "Where Judaism ends – that's where Zionism begins."
• "Any Torah-true Jew who believes in our still being in golus knows that Chazal forbid us to incite other nations. This particular point divides those fearful of Hashem from the heretical movements – the Reform, "Enlightened," and Zionism – that have gained control over the Jewish Nation in current history."