As the first chief rabbi for the modern state of Israel, Isaac Herzog helped persuade Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to exempt 400 ultra-Orthodox men from the draft so they could study full time in yeshivas.

“After the horrible Shoah, in which tens of thousands of students in Europe, their teachers and sages were destroyed,” Rabbi Herzog wrote in 1949, “they should be released from the army in order to allow these few to continue to study our holy Torah, which is also a need and an honor for our state.”