Menachem Friedman

Menachem Friedman, known as a pioneer in the study of Orthodoxy in Israel, passed away in March 2020 after a long illness. He was born in Palestine in 1936 and raised in the Orthodox community of B’nei B’rak. After a traditional Jewish education in the “Yishuv HeChadash” as well as the Hebron yeshivas, and service in the intelligence corps of the Israeli Defense Forces, he was trained as a sociologist at the Hebrew University, where he was one of several outstanding students of the late Jacob Katz, who also served as his dissertation supervisor. As such, his training was shaped by Katz’s historical approaches to sociology. His doctoral dissertation about the Ashkenazic and largely orthodox settlement in Palestine during the British Mandate period was the frst truly sociological analysis of a community whose subsequent infuence on religious life in the new State of Israel would be formative. This would ultimately lead to his frst important book Chevra v’Da’at, Society and Religion: The Non-Zionist Orthodoxy in Eretz-Israel, 1918–1936, which examined the spectrum of orthodoxy in the early years of the Jewish settlement in Palestine and later the state. He went on to write four more books and countless articles, most of which have become classics in the feld. Two that stand out and continue to be cited are his extraordinarily creative article in 1993 entitled, "The Lost Kiddush Cup: Changes in Ashkenazic Haredi Culture—A Tradition in Crisis," and his seminal "The Haredim and the Holocaust" in 1990.