(Continued from last week)
Raphael served as a Knesset Member for 26 years. During that entire period he was a member of the prestigious Committee on Foreign Affairs and Security. At various times, he was also chairman of the Law Committee and a member of other parliamentary committees.
He was always a forceful spokesman of his party in the Israeli parliament, explaining its views on a variety of subjects and problems. He often spoke in praise of Torah education, defending it against those who wanted to impede its growth and sharply criticized secular education without Torah, whose failure was manifest.
In a speech he held in the Knesset over 40 years ago, he fortetold the rise among the Jews of Israel of a mighty movement of spiritual religious awakening. When heckled by fellow legislators how he knew that, he replied in great detail, stating inter alia that the dissemination of Torah literature was breaking all records and that the number of Yeshivot and their students was growing steadily.
In an earlier speech in 1952 in which he asked the government to support higher institutes of Torah studies, he had told the Knesset that many Gedolei Yisrael had settled in the country, and that there were nowadays outstanding Illuyim and Matmidim in Yeshivot through the land. He advised Knesset members to visit the Yeshivot and see for themselves their straitened circumstances.
In all his speeches, whether in the Knesset or elsewhere, Raphael never failed to quote a Gemara, a Midrash, a Hasidic Vort or a rabbinic anecdote.
In the autumn of 1961 Raphael was appointed Deputy Minister of Health, a post he held for three and a half years. During that period he reorganized the Ministry and greatly improved the country’s health services. Members of the Governemtna s well as leaders of the opposition haield his activities.
He built new hospitals and clinic, provided for the repair of old ones and saw to the replacement of outdate equipment. In order to meet the existing shortage of nurses he encouraged young women, whether longtime residents or new immigrants, to enter the profession. He appointed a committee of rabbis and physicians to establish guidelines acceptable to both for the perfomances of autopsies.
Soon after his appointment as Deputy Minister of Health, Raphael toured the country’s hospitals and other medical institutions. He also visited the Acre Fortress, which had served as a prison during the British rule in Palestine and had been converted into a hospital for mental patients by the Israeli authorities. Raphael was shocked by the overcrowding. He was also greatly pained by the fact that mentally sick people were quartered even in the room where Jabotinsky had been held when he was arrested by the British in 1920 for having organized the defesne of Jerusalem’s Jews against Arab pogromists. That was also the room where Dov Gruner and other martyrs of the Jewish underground had spent their last days. (I rememer the days when the Acre Fortress was turned into a mental hospital. Menachem Begin and his followers, as well as other people in Israel, protested strongly asserting that this was an insult to the memory of the heroes of the underground who had gone to the gallows in Acre. Ben Gurion, who had always evinced hostility to the Irgun Zvai Leumi, was not moved by the protests.)
During his visit to the Acre