Moshe Levinger

Moshe Levinger was born in 1935 in Jerusalem

Levinger was born in Jerusalem in 1935. His parents had immigrated from Germany in 1933 and settled in the Shaarei Hesed neighborhood. His father was a doctor, and his mother ran a guesthouse in their home.

He studied at the Horev school, Kfar HaRoeh Yeshiva and Mercaz HaRav, where he was ordained as a rabbi. He was a student of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook and Rabbi Avraham Shapira. He was active in the Ezra youth movement.

In 1960 he became rabbi of Kibbutz Lavi, the first rabbi to serve a kibbutz. In 1967 he became rabbi of Moshav Nehalim. At Passover 1968 he led a group that held a Seder in a Hebron hotel and stayed, and the group later moved to the new settlement of Kiryat Arba.

He was one of the heads of Gush Emunim and a founder of the Yesha Council. In 1992 he led the Torah VeEretz Yisrael party, which did not pass the electoral threshold. He was arrested and charged several times, and in 1988 he was charged with manslaughter after a Palestinian store owner was killed in Hebron.

In 2005 he founded the Nachala settlement movement with Daniella Weiss. He received the Moskowitz Prize for Zionism in 2013. He died on May 16, 2015, and was buried in the old cemetery in Hebron.