Chaim Drukman

Chaim Drukman was born in 1932 in Kuty

Drukman was born in Kuty, then in Poland and today in Ukraine, to Avraham Mordechai and Milkah. During the Holocaust he hid with his parents. In 1944 he reached the Land of Israel with a childless Jewish couple who posed as his parents, and his family was reunited after the war.

He studied at the Aliyah Institute and at the Bnei Akiva yeshiva in Kfar Haroeh, and was active as a Bnei Akiva counselor. He later studied at Mercaz HaRav in Jerusalem under Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, who appointed him to teach there.

In 1964 he founded Yeshivat Or Etzion in Merkaz Shapira and added a hesder yeshiva there in 1977. He led it for the rest of his life and from 1996 headed the Center for Bnei Akiva Yeshivot. He was criticized for not reporting sexual abuse at Netiv Meir Yeshiva and for inviting Mordechai Elon to speak after his conviction.

He helped found Gush Emunim in 1974 and served in the Knesset for the National Religious Party from 1977. He was Deputy Minister of Religious Affairs from 1981 and resigned in 1982 in protest of the withdrawal from Sinai.

From 2004 he directed the State Conversion Authority, working with immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Haredi rabbis disputed his standards, and after rabbinic courts canceled thousands of his conversions, the Supreme Court reinstated them. He received the Israel Prize in 2012 and died in 2022.