Yitzchak Ginzburg (born 14 November 1944) is an American born Israeli rabbi. He is a follower of the Chabad Lubavich movement and currently Rosh Yeshivah of the Od Yosef Chai Yeshivah in the Settlement Yitzhar in the West Bank, and the leader of the kabbalistic Gal Einai organization. He has published numerous books. A charge of incitement to racism was dropped after he made a clarification statement.
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Ginsburgh was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1944.[1] His father held a PhD in education and consulted for various Jewish organizations.
While living in Philadelphia, he met a descendant of the Nadvorna Chassidic dynasty and at the age of 14 became a baal teshuva. He attended the University of Chicago majoring in mathematics and philosophy. He then completed a Masters in Mathematics at the Belfer Graduate School of Yeshiva University. At the age of 22, he decided to devote himself entirely to Torah study.[1]
In 1965 he went to Israel and studied at the Yeshivah of Kamenitz in Jerusalem. He spent 1966 through 1967 at the Slonim shul in Tiberias. After the Six Day War, Ginsburgh went to Jerusalem, and was one of the first to move into the old Jewish quarter. He started to study the Chabad school of Chassidus in depth. That year he visited the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, and remained in Crown Heights, Brooklyn for several months. When he returned to Israel he married, and began to teach Talmud, Shulchan Aruch, and Chassidut to a group of students in Jerusalem.
In 1983 he was asked by the Chabad Rabbi and Jerusalem philanthropist Yosef Eliyahu Deutsch to serve as head of the Shuva Yisra'el Yeshivah on Yo'el Street. Rabbi Ginsburgh gave frequent classes on a wide variety of subjects, from the exoteric to the esoteric parts of the Torah. Many were taped and form a large parte of the 15,000 lecture archive of his classes.
Until the retreat of the IDF from the Tomb of Joseph in Nablus during the Al-Aqsa Intifada (2001), Ginsburgh served as the Rosh Yeshivah of the Od Yosef Chai Yeshivah in Nablus and as the head of a Kollel in the ancient Shalom al Yisrael synagogue in Jericho. he has resumed his teaching at the Od Yosef Chai Yeshivah since its relocation to Yitzhar.
Ginsburgh lives with his family in Kfar Chabad, Israel and delivers classes throughout Israel, the United States and France. He devotes most of his time and resources to writing and publishing original works on Kabbalah and Chassidut that discuss a range of topics, from commentaries on the Chumash to the relationship between Torah and science. These books are published by Gal Einai, his organization, whose name is taken from Psalms 119:18.
He has published over 70 volumes of original work in Hebrew and another 13 in English.
His students include:
Ginsburgh advocates the reinstitution of Jewish monarchy in the Land of Israel.[4] He opposes efforts to remove Jewish settlements from the West Bank and encourages his followers to attempt to dissuade soldiers and police officer from carrying out evacuations.[5] He advocates "Hebrew labor" − the idea that Jews should only employ other Jews — and believes that Gentiles should not be allowed to live in the Land of Israel,[6] unless they become the "righteous of the nations", accepting Jewish dominion.[7]
Ginsburgh also supports the rebuilding of the Jewish temple, believing that this would facilitate spiritual elevation and hasten redemption.[8] He favors the practice of Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount, the site of the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque.[9]
In a rabbinical responsa published in 1995, Ginsburgh stated that "It is forbidden to kill a non-Jew who is not making war against us."[10]
In his 2007 book Kabbalah and Meditation for the Nations Ginsburgh writes:
“Ours is the first generation in modern times to understand the truly universal human condition and to seek to bring all peoples of the earth together in peace and harmony. We are the first generation to truly understand that we are faced with the challenge of either inhabiting our planet harmoniously or not inhabiting it at all. Filling our future is the fundamentalism that threatens to pit one religion against another. But, our different relationships and understandings of G-d should not be the reason for conflict but the source of goodwill in building our relationships with one another and our ability to understand others”.[11]
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has called Ginsburg "a well known radical on his views on Israel Arab public", noting his "prosecution in the past for incitement to racism after having published a book insisting that there is no place for Arabs in the state of Israel".[12]
During the trial of seven of his students for the murder of an Arab girl during a violent settler rampage through the Palestinian West Bank village of Kifl Hares, Ginsburg said that in religious law, given the inequality between Arab and Jewish blood, Arabs who kill Jews warrant punishment, but Jews who kill Arabs should be let off. The Ashkenazi chief rabbi Avraham Shapiro condemned Ginzburg's views, the only one of the Israeli rabbinate to do so.[13][14] He was cited as asserting at the time that: “Jewish blood is not the same as Arab blood. He who is not a Jew, and throws stones, or threatens Jews, comes under the (biblical injunction) 'you should kill him first'.”[15]
In 1989, Ginsburg was quoted in the New York Times regarding his views on recent attacks against Palestinians and the rise of racism in Israel:
Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg had offered biblical justification for the view that the spilling of non-Jewish blood was a lesser offense than the spilling of Jewish blood. "Any trial based on the assumption that Jews and goyim are equal is a total travesty of justice", he said.[16]
In 1994, Ginsburgh received publicity from his article "Baruch Hagever"[17] in which he praised Baruch Goldstein who had massacred 29 Arab worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron.[18][19] Rabbi Ginsburgh wrote that it is possible to view Baruch Goldstein's act as following five Halachic principles, namely "sanctification of God's name", "saving life" (referring to testimonies that he had allegedly received regarding a planned Arab massacre of Jews[20]), "revenge", "eradication of the seed of Amalek" and "war".[21] Motti Inbari commented on this:
In his writings, Ginzburg gives prominence to Halachic and kabbalistic approaches that emphasize the distinction between Jew and non-Jew (Gentile), imposing a clear separation and hierarchy in this respect. He claims that while the Jews are the Chosen People and were created in God's image, the Gentiles do not have this status.... Ginzburg stated that, on the theoretical level, if a Jew requires a liver transplant to survive, it would be permissible to seize a Gentile and take their liver forcefully. From this point only a small further step is required to actively encourage and support the killing of non-Jews, as Ginzburg did in the case of Goldstein.[22]