Rabbi, not rabble-rouser
By Chaim Levinson • Ha'aretzRabbi Shlomo Riskin, 70, holds a place of prominence among religious -Zionist rabbis. He was born in New York and received his ordination as a rabbi from Yeshiva University.
In 1983, he immigrated to Israel and began serving as the rabbi of Efrat in the West Bank. Riskin is very active in educational affairs and heads the Ohr Torah Stone educational facilities, including a boys high school and a girls high school in the Ramot neighborhood of Jerusalem, the Midreshet Lindenbaum girls seminary, the Neveh Shmuel high-school yeshiva and additional religious high schools for girls in Gush Etzion, as well as the Straus-Amiel rabbinical institute and the Beren-Amiel educators institute.
Riskin's views are considered liberal among the national religious public. He has a progressive position on the status of women in religious Jewish society and is extremely active in assisting women who have been refused a religious bill of divorce by their husbands.
In the past, he proposed a creative solution that keeps with Jewish law: having a rabbinical court expropriate the money promised by a man to his wife in the marriage certificate, which would retroactively annul the marriage and free the woman.
Riskin also participated in the past in a march by women who were refused a divorce and who wished to protest about their status and the attitude toward them of the rabbinical establishment.
In the political sphere, Riskin does not believe that there is a Jewish religious prohibition against giving up parts of the Greater Land of Israel and he is strictly against refusing orders in the army.
He has gone on record calling members of the Reform Movement "partners" because they act toward bringing Jews closer to the fold.
Riskin was recently in the headlines among the national religious public after an interview in which he called Jesus, "Rabbi Jesus." Following an outcry against him, he published an clarification in which he said that although he had used the term rabbi "to refer to Jesus poetically, he was not a rabbi in the classical sense of the term. It was used only to explain to a Christian audience the Jewish Jesus, and in hindsight, the term was an inappropriate one to use."