Video: Israel Is Our Homeland

Reuven Rivlin, former Speaker of the Knesset and President-elect of Israel as of this morning, is a Jersualemite with ties that go back for generations.  His ancestor, Rabbi Hillel Rivlin, a relative of the great Vilna Gaon, came to Ottoman Palestine 73 years before the first glimmerings of political Zionism.

Rabbi Hillel came because the Gaon instructed his students and family to do so, in preparation for the arrival of Moshiach.

Thirty years later, Rivlin’s mother’s family, followers of Chabad chassidus, arrived in the Holy Land.  Rabbi Hillel, a follower of the Gaon, married his 7th cousin, the Rivlin girl from the Chabad family — the first marriage in Ottoman Palestine between Chassidim and their opponents, the “Misnagdim.”

To those who say that the State of Israel is an answer to the Holocaust, or a sop granted the Jews by the United Nations, Rivlin points to his family’s tenure in Israel, long before “Zionism,” long before the terrible horrors of the Shoah, and long before the United Nations (or its previous incarnation, the League of Nations) came into existence.  Jews belong in Israel because it is our ancestral homeland, and Jerusalem is the capital city of every Jew.


Watch on TorahCafé.com!

One Comment

  • declasse' intellectual

    Just remember, according to Obama and Kerry, Israel is not the Jewish homeland!!!!!!Remember Kerry’s recent anti-Jewish racial slur.