Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935)

Abraham Isaac Kook, born in Greiva (Latvia), served as rabbi of Jaffa and the moshavot from 1904 and became the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Mandatory Palestine in 1921, alongside Sephardic Chief Rabbi Yaakov Meir. A mystic and poet, he taught a religious reading of Zionism — seeing the secular pioneers themselves as instruments of redemption — and founded the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva (1924), whose students shaped religious Zionism for a century. ◈ Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 12