Chazon Ish

Rabbi Avraham Yeshayahu Karelitz, known by the title of his books, the Chazon Ish, arrives in Mandate Eretz Israel from Vilna in 1933, settles in Bnei Brak, and, holding no formal office, becomes the recognized halakhic authority of the Haredi world. He rules extensively on agricultural law that had lain dormant for centuries and became practical again once Jews farmed the land, above all the laws of the sabbatical year (shmita), and on questions the new state raised, such as his ruling that closing an electric circuit on the Sabbath counts as building. In a famous 1952 meeting with Ben-Gurion he compares the two communities to two wagons meeting on a narrow road: the empty wagon must make way for the laden one, and the observant community, carrying the full load of tradition, is the laden wagon. The image framed Haredi–secular relations for generations. His insistence on full-time Torah study as the community's central task shapes the yeshiva exemption and the structure of Israeli Haredi life.