About Arutz Meir

Arutz Meir

Arutz Meir is the broadcast network of Machon Meir, the Jerusalem yeshiva and outreach institute founded by Rabbi Dov Bigon in 1974. Through Arutz Meir, the institute distributes its Torah teaching far beyond its Jerusalem campus: on the internet and on cable television, through websites and social media pages, in five languages — Hebrew, English, Spanish, French and Russian. The institute describes itself as a world leader in distributing Torah, and the scale of the archive behind that claim is documented: more than twenty-five thousand video and audio classes are archived and available online, with new classes added daily. Arutz Meir carries the live and recorded teaching of the yeshiva's rabbis, the Torah of the Land of Israel in the tradition of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and his son Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, whose students founded the institute. It is also a production operation in its own right: in a recording studio on the Machon Meir campus, Arutz Meir creates original programming for children, extending the institute's educational mission to the youngest audiences. Arutz Meir is therefore best understood not as a conventional television station but as the media arm of an educational movement — the means by which a yeshiva built for returning and immigrant students in Jerusalem addresses Jews around the world.

Machon Meir: the institute behind the channel

Machon Meir was established in Jerusalem shortly after the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, formally dated to 1974, by Rabbi Dov Bigon. Bigon had been a commander in the Israel Defense Forces who took part in the liberation of Jerusalem and the Western Wall in 1967; moved by the return of the Jewish people to their homeland, he turned to Torah study at the Mercaz HaRav Kook Yeshiva in Jerusalem, the flagship institution of religious Zionism. There he saw soldiers and students arriving after the Yom Kippur War seeking religious guidance — Israelis searching, in the institute's phrase, for their first steps toward teshuva, a return to their Jewish identity — in a yeshiva with no programme designed for beginners. Before founding his own institute, Bigon consulted Rabbis Zvi Yehuda Kook and Haim Druckman. At first he welcomed soldiers and students into his own home; as the group grew, those gatherings became Machon Meir. The institute was named in memory of Eliezer Meir Lifshitz, a paratrooper reservist killed in the Yom Kippur War, whose name the channel itself carries to this day.

The Torah of love and faith

The teaching Arutz Meir distributes is defined by the institute's ideology. Machon Meir's Torah study programme is based on the teachings of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of British Mandate Palestine and the spiritual father of religious Zionism, as transmitted by his son Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, under whom Bigon studied at Mercaz HaRav. The institute describes its mission as spreading the Torah of "Love and Faith" in the inclusive and passionate spirit of its teachers from the heart of Jerusalem. Bigon's own account of the institute's founding, preserved on the institute's site, turns on a night of studying Rav Kook's Orot — "Lights" — when he rose and told Rav Zvi Yehuda that all the lights were remaining in one room, and that the light had to be given to all of the Jewish people. That impulse — to carry the teaching outward, beyond the study hall — is the direct ancestor of Arutz Meir: broadcasting is, for this institute, not a marketing adjunct to education but the fulfilment of its founding purpose. The yeshiva is not officially affiliated with Mercaz HaRav, but the two share a closely similar ideology, and Machon Meir is strongly associated with the national religious stream, full participation in Israeli society and service in the Israel Defense Forces.

An outreach yeshiva for beginners and immigrants

Machon Meir was founded as an outreach yeshiva, geared to students who had not previously received systematic Jewish education, and it was among the first institutions of the religious Zionist branch of the teshuva movement, which sought to introduce students gradually to a religious way of life. Its students are typically young men between about twenty and thirty-five. Full-time students are expected to observe Shabbat, the laws of kashrut and standards of modesty in dress, and the institute encourages service in the Israel Defense Forces; living in Israel and Jewish settlement throughout the Land of Israel are integral elements of its worldview. During the 1980s and 1990s the institute grew from a small circle into a major centre of religious education enrolling hundreds of students from around the world each year; by 2004 thousands had studied there, and thousands of alumni now remain in personal contact with their rabbis from abroad. That dispersed alumni body — joined by new immigrants whom the yeshiva helps integrate through Hebrew instruction and contact with native-born Israelis — forms the natural first audience of Arutz Meir, and explains why a Jerusalem yeshiva needed a broadcast network at all.

Programmes and languages of study

The curriculum that Arutz Meir records and distributes mirrors the institute's multilingual structure. In Jerusalem, the yeshiva offers full-time, intensive study programmes for young Jewish men of all backgrounds and levels of knowledge in Hebrew, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian. Areas of study include the Hebrew Bible, Talmud, the writings of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, history, Musar literature and philosophy, alongside a men-only Hebrew ulpan that helps immigrant students enter Israeli society; the institute is also a common destination for non-Jews from around the world seeking an Orthodox conversion to Judaism recognised by the State of Israel, and it has a sister organisation, Machon Ora, offering study programmes for young women in Hebrew, French, Spanish and Russian. Educational activities extend beyond the classroom to excursions in nature and visits to historical and religious sites across the country. Arutz Meir's five broadcast languages — Hebrew, English, Spanish, French and Russian — correspond to the institute's main teaching departments, so that a class given in Jerusalem to an English-speaking beginner or a Russian-speaking immigrant can reach viewers in the same language community worldwide.

The broadcast network and its archive

Arutz Meir's own description, given in the institute's organisational profiles, is precise about its form: a broadcast network on the internet and on cable TV, with a variety of programming, through which Jews around the world can enjoy the Torah of Eretz Yisrael on television, on websites and on Facebook pages in English, Spanish, French, Russian and Hebrew. The archive is the network's foundation — more than twenty-five thousand video and audio classes, archived and available online, with new classes added daily as the yeshiva's teaching continues. Classes in the archive range across the institute's curriculum: the weekly Torah portion, the teachings of Rav Kook on war, redemption and the Land of Israel, Jewish holidays, faith in times of trauma, and the thought of teachers such as Rabbis Shlomo Aviner and others on the faculty. The institute's sites stream classes live as well as on demand, enabling students abroad to participate in the Jerusalem learning in something close to real time. Few educational institutions of Machon Meir's size maintain a recorded teaching library of this scale, and it is this library, continually growing, that Arutz Meir exists to publish.

Children's programming from the campus studio

Arutz Meir is, in the institute's words, at the forefront of Torah education for children as well as adults. Original children's shows are written and recorded in what the institute describes as its state-of-the-art recording studio on campus, giving the network a production capability beyond the filming of lectures. This strand matters to the channel's character: a network devoted solely to recorded yeshiva classes would address only the already committed, whereas original programming made for children extends the institute's outreach mission to families and to the next generation, in the accessible forms children's media requires. The children's studio output sits alongside the class archive as the second pillar of Arutz Meir's programming — one pillar documentary, capturing the teaching of the beit midrash, the other creative, producing new content for viewers who may never enter a yeshiva. Both serve the same founding idea recorded in Bigon's journal: to live by the light of the Torah and, to the degree he merited, to shine that light on others with love.

Location: Kiryat Moshe, Jerusalem

Arutz Meir operates from the Machon Meir campus in Kiryat Moshe, a neighbourhood in western Jerusalem close to Givat Shaul, at the entrance to the city. The location is part of the institute's identity: Machon Meir presents itself as teaching from the heart of Jerusalem, and its educational programme treats residence in the Land of Israel not as background but as a central element of the learning experience — participating in the historic return of the Jewish people to build the State of Israel. Students tour ancient and modern Jerusalem and hike in regions such as the Golan Heights; the institute's broadcasts carry Jerusalem teaching to viewers for whom aliyah — immigration to Israel — is completed, contemplated or out of reach. The channel's Jerusalem origin also distinguishes its content within religious broadcasting: the "Torah of Eretz Yisrael," the Land-of-Israel-centred teaching of the Kook tradition, is a specific theological emphasis, and Arutz Meir is its dedicated distribution channel, produced where that tradition's institutions are concentrated.

Digital presence beyond television

Although catalogued as a television channel, Arutz Meir's centre of gravity is digital. Its classes are distributed through the institute's websites — including its English-language Jewish Learning Hub — through video platforms and playlists organised by teacher and topic, through Facebook pages in its several languages, and through podcast editions of its classes, with new material added daily. The institute's sites publish classes on current themes alongside the archive: teachings occasioned by war and national events, holiday preparation, and the weekly portion, recorded by rabbis including members of the faculty whose names recur across hundreds of archived lessons. This structure — a broadcast network whose schedule is effectively an ever-expanding on-demand library — reflects the audience it serves: alumni, immigrants, converts and seekers spread across time zones, who study when they can rather than when a channel schedules. Cable carriage in Israel gives the network a place in the domestic television landscape, but its defining technology is the archive and the stream.

Significance within religious broadcasting in Israel

Arutz Meir occupies a distinctive place among Israel's religious broadcasters. Israel has seen dedicated Jewish television ventures launched as commercial channels, and religious parties and movements operate substantial media of their own; Arutz Meir is neither a commercial station nor a party organ, but the self-published voice of a single educational institute with a fifty-year history. Its authority derives from its teachers and its tradition — the Kook yeshivot lineage — rather than from ratings or advertising. For the religious Zionist public, and for the worldwide community of baalei teshuva and converts the institute has educated since 1974, it provides continuous access to a specific school of Torah teaching that would otherwise require physical presence in a Jerusalem study hall. In that sense Arutz Meir completes the arc of Machon Meir's founding story: an institute created because its founder believed the light studied in one Jerusalem room had to reach the whole Jewish people, now distributing more than twenty-five thousand classes, in five languages, from that same city to the world.