From Special Ops to Haredi Rabbi: The Beirut Miracle That Changed Everything

On the third day of the First Lebanon War, Sivan 5742, Israeli forces reached Beirut’s airport, thirty kilometers from Damascus. The army tried to keep pushing toward Damascus, but the troops were hit again and again by Katyusha rockets. Around the same time came the now-famous "Battle of Sultan Yacoub," in which several Israeli soldiers were missing for decades. The Shin Bet discovered that the Katyushas were being launched from the courtyard of the Russian embassy in Beirut; the army wanted to shell the launchers, but Prime Minister Begin objected—he did not want to open another front against the Russians.

The IDF Chief of Staff, Rafael Eitan, decided to send a commando unit to wipe out the batteries in a surgical operation. It was insane and dangerous, and the odds were that the soldiers would be killed—but internationally there was a strong pretext to bomb the Russian embassy. So twelve soldiers from an elite, top-secret unit were sent. On Friday night they boarded a helicopter at Sultan Yacoub and were inserted into Beirut early Shabbat morning.

Eliezer Broida, one of the twelve, recalls: "The mission felt like suicide. Everything was lit up, and the distance from the Russian embassy was three and a half kilometers. We had a choice: pass through the Christians in East Beirut, or get closer to Sabra and Shatila in South Beirut. And if we didn’t go there, the remaining option was to pass by Beirut University, known as a global hub for terror organizations."

The instructor who had flown in from Israel to command the operation didn’t know Beirut at all. The soldiers felt they were being sent to go through the motions for the Russians—at the cost of a very real risk to their lives. The moment they set out, on Beirut’s Avenue de Gaulle, a rain of Katyushas opened up on them. One commander was killed on the spot, others were wounded, and snipers poured deadly fire at them from every direction. The soldiers begged over the radio for air support, but the standing order was: no air support in West Beirut, period.

With two dead and two wounded around him, Eliezer Broida looked around, saw the Syrian positions, and understood he didn’t have a shred of a chance. All the training, all the gear and drills—none of it would help here. And then, for the first time in his life, he said: "From the depths I called You, Hashem." He knew the verse, and he simply shouted it. Then he heard a voice inside his heart answer him: "I will get you out—but change your life."

And then the planes arrived—against orders. Israeli jets took out the sniper positions one by one, hit the Syrian batteries, and cleared the area. Two minutes of unbearable noise, and then silence—no more threat. Broida stood there with his comrades, two dead and two critically wounded at their feet, and suddenly: an Israeli army jeep rolled up. "Did they send you to us?" "No—we took a wrong turn…"

From there, with the escort, the force advanced safely and destroyed the Katyusha launchers in the embassy courtyard—a clean strike; not even marks on the walls remained. All the remaining soldiers returned unharmed. Broida turned to his commanders and thanked them for the air support they had sent, but the commander was stunned: Air support? In West Beirut? You would have been dead—there’s no such thing; it’s forbidden. To this day he has not learned who those pilots were or how they arrived to save them at the exact moment—but that mattered less. What mattered was the promise he had made to the Creator of the world—and he kept it, to the letter.

Eliezer Broida grew up in the United States in a prominent Israeli family, the Ludwig family. He adopted the last name Broida after his grandmother’s family, which was wiped out in the Holocaust, out of a desire to preserve their memory. After completing a master’s degree he made aliyah to Israel, to Kibbutz Sde Boker—like a true Zionist, like Ben-Gurion. Later he joined an elite unit. He served in the Yom Kippur War, in Operation Litani, and in the First Lebanon War—but this episode changed his life. He left the unit and entered the Karlinyeshiva in Meah Shearim. His first course of study was Yiddish. "You can’t learn in Karlin in Meah Shearim with sabra Hebrew—and not even with excellent English." He ground it out, and today he speaks fluent Yiddish. His second course of study was to understand the Gemara. He had cracked many important and interesting things in life, but he had no grasp of the Gemara. He worked on it for nine years and achieved impressive results: rabbinic ordination from Rabbi Noach Weinberg, head of Aish HaTorah; from Rabbi Zalman Nechemia Goldberg; and from Rabbi Kolitz, the chief rabbi of Jerusalem.

After becoming a bona fide Torah scholar, he became the rabbi at Ramla Prison and took upon himself all the spiritual—and even emotional—challenges of Jews who had found themselves in the unfortunate situation of being inmates. At first the prisoners mocked him: the rabbi with the scraggly beard who speaks Yiddish—he’s going to guide us? But the rabbi, still strong and fit, demonstrated a few physical capabilities that made the point. They realized he was not only a learned Torah scholar but also an educated man and a veteran of an elite unit. He made a deep impression on them and succeeded in influencing and repairing a great deal.

He spent half his day in a kollel learning, and even wrote a commentary on the Five Books of the Torah titled Pi HaBe’er. In the evenings he worked as a sofer STaM, writing tefillin and mezuzot. Later he established a kollel of his own, and most importantly: he drew close to Breslov, and today he is responsible for the massive distribution of Breslov books in Israel and around the world.