VISITING ISRAEL Solomon B. Freehof
QUESTION: A couple saved for years to visit Israel for a month. But now they plan to use the money for the college expenses of their children. Have they the right to do so? Is it not a supreme, religious duty to go to Palestine?(Rabbi Allen S. Maller, Culver City , California )"
ANSWER: A person nowadays may want to go to the Land of Israel and consider his visit to be a moral obligation. In that case it is a matter for him to decide how important this is to him in comparison with other uses for his money. But the question here is a deeper one than a sense of group commitment or pride. It is a question of religious duty. Is it a religious duty to go to Palestine and does one violate any religious duty if one fails to do so?
This question of whether it is a religious obligation to settle in the Holy Land has been discussed since the Middle Ages and, interestingly enough, has become again from the halakhic point of view the subject of a rather heated discussion in our day. The Chassidim , especially the Satmar group, who consider themselves the most completely and uncompromisingly religious of all Jews , are also bitterly opposed to the modern State of Israel . It is therefore necessary for them(and for those who are like-minded) to come to terms with this religious question. Because of this deep concern on the part of these anti-modern-Israel Orthodox Jews , a considerable literature has grown up on this subject. The most important is the collection by Moses Bloch in three volumes of a work called Dovey Sifse Yeshenim, in which he gathers all the opinions of the Orthodox rabbinate of the last hundred years against a modern Jewish state and the plans to establish it. The very first letter in the
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