As Israel's fierce public debate over Haredi enlistment continues, with headlines dominated by arrests of yeshiva students and clashes over the draft, a decades-old story of an unlikely friendship between two very different Israeli leaders is resurfacing online. It centers on a chance encounter 73 years ago between two 17 year olds at the Jerusalem draft office: one was Aharon Barak, who would go on to become president of Israel's Supreme Court, and the other was Rabbi Shmuel Berezovsky, who would later become the Slonimer Rebbe.
In a video circulating online, Barak recounted the moment in his own words. He described arriving at the draft office in Jerusalem to receive his call up notice and finding a group of religious young men there seeking a deferment. When Barak's secular friends began confronting the group, demanding to know how they could avoid army service, Barak noticed one modest, quiet young man standing apart and felt for him. He invited the boy to sit and talk instead, and in the course of their conversation the two discovered they had been born on the exact same date, the 29th of Elul in the Hebrew year 5696.
The two shook hands and went their separate ways, and the connection lay dormant for decades until a letter surfaced that the Slonimer Rebbe had sent Barak around their shared 60th birthday. In it, the future rebbe recalled that fateful day at the draft office as his first encounter with secular peers his own age, describing it as an uncomfortable and unfamiliar confrontation between two different worlds. He wrote that amid the tension, one secular boy named Aharon Barak stood up and firmly supported him, a gesture he called completely unexpected. The letter closed with warm wishes for a good and blessed year, one of greater unity and understanding.
The exchange, born from one boy defending another against peer pressure, grew into a rapport that lasted between the two men for decades, and is now being held up by many as a model of patience and tolerance amid the current strain between secular and Haredi Israel.
