Shortly before Israel was plunged into two years of war by the Hamas terror attacks of October 7, 2023, Yael had the privilege to sit down with former Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid.

Much like Yael taking up the mantle of her abba, Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, Lapid followed in his own father’s footsteps, as a writer and a politician. Also a prolific writer, he wrote the posthumous memoir of his father, Tommy Lapid, an Israeli journalist, politician, and Holocaust survivor.

And here, he shares one of the key lessons from the Holocaust—that every Israeli has a duty to make sure the Jewish state always exists. Lapid relates that his father’s story of surviving the bloodbath of the Jewish ghetto in Budapest is a stark reminder that he “cannot live in a world in which I don’t have a place to go.” In sharing his father’s story, the former prime minister says he is telling the story of the Jewish people.

But The Fellowship and Rabbi Eckstein also have a special connection to the Lapid family, which Yair shares in this warm, insightful, and enlightening conversation between two people who have devoted their lives to serving Israel and the Jewish people.

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