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Till death do them part: After top rabbi dies, power struggle blazes at elite Haredi yeshiva

37 7
08.01.2025

A sacrilegious tug-of-war over the body of a brilliant Talmud scholar and firebrand as he was being brought to rest has unleashed a new bout of violence in a decades-old power struggle at Ponevezh Yeshiva, where young men belonging to the intellectual elite of the Haredi community are educated.

Divisive in his lifetime, the head rabbi of Ponevezh, Rabbi Asher Deutsch, was no less so in his death.

On December 16, Deutsch’s body awaited burial at his apartment at Rabbi Wasserman Street 5 in Bnei Brak, a short walk from Ponevezh Yeshiva. Ponevezh is the Haredi equivalent of an Ivy League university where Deutsch taught since 1988.

Meanwhile, two warring yeshiva factions bickered over where to bury his remains.

Deutsch’s detractors, aligned with Rabbi Eliezer Kahaneman, the 77-year-old grandson of Ponevezh’s founder — and who has property rights over most of Ponevezh’s assets, including the Ponevezh Cemetery — opposed allowing Deutsch’s burial anywhere in the cemetery, let alone in the VIP section.

Deutsch’s supporters, led by 77-year-old Rabbi Shmuel Markovitz, who is married to Kahaneman’s sister, insisted that Deutsch’s body be buried in the section of Ponevezh Cemetery reserved for the yeshiva’s most illustrious rabbis.

A secular former judge was called in to mediate.

Retired Jerusalem District Court judge David Cheshin, who was born into a well-connected Haredi family and speaks Yiddish but left religious observance after IDF service, has been serving as mediator in a myriad of conflicts between the two brothers-in-law for three years.

As the recitation of Psalms by tens of thousands of Deutsch’s students, followers and admirers through a vast PA system dragged on, Cheshin called an impromptu Zoom meeting that brought together representatives of the Deutsch family and representatives of Kahaneman and Markovitz in an attempt to reach a compromise that would enable Deutsch’s body to be laid to rest in a dignified manner.

After over two hours of back-and-forth, Cheshin finally got the sides to agree that Deutsch would be buried in Ponevezh Cemetery, but not in the coveted “Tet” section, but rather in the neighboring “Yud” section.

But even after Cheshin’s ruling and Deutsch’s subsequent burial, the sides remained split over whether or not Deutsch ended up buried in the plot agreed upon in Cheshin’s arbitration decision.

Kahaneman’s camp said in an affidavit written on December 25 that Deutsch’s followers buried him in the Tet section in a stolen plot in direct violation of the agreement.

Markovitz’s camp responded in an affidavit on January 2 that it was Kahaneman who attempted to renege on the arbitration agreement and that Deutsch was buried as stipulated in Cheshin’s ruling.

The bickering escalated during........

© The Times of Israel


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