Rabbi Abitbol, May 1968, and the invention of a Talmudic counterculture: the Strasbourg student Yeshiva

Rabbi Abitbol, May 1968, and the invention of a Talmudic counterculture: the Strasbourg student Yeshiva,
by Peter Honigmann, K: Jews, Europe, the XXIˢᵗ century, 2026-06-18.

On April 8, Rav Eliahou Abitbol, founder of the Strasbourg Student Yeshiva and an unconventional figure in the French Jewish community, passed away. By tapping into the rebellious spirit of a generation weary of their parents’ petit-bourgeois Judaism and by recruiting from far-left circles, he catalyzed - beginning in May 1968 - a return to Talmudic study that set a trend. In 1996, Peter Honigmann, who had joined the Students’ Yeshiva in 1984 from East Berlin, conducted a series of interviews with the rabbi and some of his closest students to trace the origins, transformations, and paradoxes of the anarcho-orthodoxy unique to the microcosm established by Eliahou Abitbol. Written in the narrative present tense, we reproduce the text here in its original form.

A look into a particularly French counter-cultural movement, as much about French Jews responding to the 1968 Paris Commune as it was about French Jews returning to Jewish practice and tradition.