Netanyahu receives grandfather’s letter to rabbi Kook

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu received an emotional gift late Sunday: A letter his paternal grandfather, rabbi Nathan Mileikowsky, wrote in 1933 to Ashkenazi chief rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook.

Ahead of Netanyahu’s Jerusalem Day speech at the Mercaz Harav yeshiva, its dean, Rabbi Yaakov Shapira, presented the prime minister with the letter in which Mileikowsky asked Kook to help clear rightist Zionist leader Abba Ahimeir, who was falsely accused of assassinating leftist Zionist leader Chaim Arlosoroff.

Kook agreed to help in his response, which Shapira had framed together with Mileikowsky’s letter.

Mileikowsky, like his grandson, was known worldwide as a Zionist orator.

Shapira’s message in presenting the gift was that the prime minister should not give up his loyalty to the Land of Israel that he received from his grandfather and his father, Benzion Netanyahu, who died three weeks ago.

Netanyahu said it was emotional to receive the letter, which he had not known existed. He promised never to abandon his commitment to Jerusalem.

“There are those who say that to guarantee our future we must divide Jerusalem,” he said in a reference to former prime minister Ehud Olmert. “I say, to guarantee our future, I will make sure that Jerusalem remains our undivided capital.”

Netanyahu added that when he hears world leaders tell him not to build in Jerusalem he thinks of King David, who he said “built this city before their nations existed.”