Reply To: New book – “HaChareidim V’Haaretz”

AAQ – If you don’t want to call them religious zionists, but call them haredim who arrived to dig wells, shoin.

In other words, Chareidim don’t work, dig wells, dry swamps, etc. Aye, they did… So those guys weren’t really Chareidim…

There are hundreds of pictures extant of people with long beards and peyos working on the Moshavot and early cities of what eventually became Israel. They would probably take great offense at being called anything other than חרדים לדבר השם. Rav Akiva Yosef Schlesinger זצ״ל was a great Talmid Chochom and a formidable Kanoi. He and his followers built the “Mother of Moshavot” that became the city of Petach Tikvah…

The term “Religious Zionist” was coined two decades later at the turn of the 20th century, although many if not most of the early “Religious Zionists” (including Rav Kook himself…) could arguably be called Chareidim in terms of their religious observance and lifestyle, and continued to see themselves that way for the duration of their lifetime. The split between the Chareidim and the RZ as we know it today began when it became clear (post WWI) that the religious level of the second-generation children of the Moshavot was rapidly going downhill, thanks to the Secular Zionist “educators”. Those who insisted that building the Land was a Messianic cause that overrides everything eventually morphed into RZ in the sense that we know today (or Chilonim…), while those who held that keeping the Torah comes before anything else moved to places like the newly founded Bnei Brak and became “New Yishuv” Chareidim in the sense we think of today. One could reasonably argue that the closest thing today to the original Religious Zionism are the Har HaMor/Chardal/Chavakuk branches of RZ, although the pre-Zionist settlers were completely and thoroughly Chareidim in belief, practice and appearance.