Dovid Shmidel (also spelled Dovid Schmidel; ; April 2, 1934 – May 11, 2026) was an Austrian-born Israeli rabbi in Bnei Brak who was the Chairman of Asra Kadisha (the Committee for the Preservation of Gravesites). He was involved in struggles against excavations at various locations including at the Tomb of Maimonides in Tiberias in 1956 and at Israel's Highway 6; as well as at the disputed tomb of Antigonus II Mattathias in East Jerusalem. For an entire year, Shmidel was occupied with preserving the old Jewish cemetery in Egypt.
Biography Shmidel was born in Vienna, Austria, on April 2, 1934. In 1939, at age 5, he moved with his family to Mandatory Palestine. He studied at the Slabodka yeshiva and later at Kollel Chazon Ish in Bnei Brak under Rabbi Gedaliah Nadel.
He headed a kollel in Komemiyut for tens of married men who live in Jerusalem, Beit Shemesh, and other places, but they stay all week at the kollel and only go home for Shabbat. Shmidel delivered shiurim once or twice a week.
Shmidel died in Bnei Brak on May 11, 2026, at the age of 92.
Public disputes and controversies Shmidel's tenure as chairman of Asra Kadisha included several high-profile public disputes that received extensive coverage in Israeli media.
Stone-throwing at Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv's home (1997–1998) In 1997–1998, during preparatory excavations for the Uzi Narkiss road near Pisgat Ze'ev in Jerusalem, dozens of graves were discovered. Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, then the leading Lithuanian Haredi posek, ruled that the bones could be preserved in place by deep drilling and reinterment in clay vessels. Shmidel and Asra Kadisha rejected the compromise. Activists associated with the organization demonstrated outside Elyashiv's home in Jerusalem and threw stones at the building. The Lithuanian Haredi daily Yated Ne'eman published a sharp article condemning Asra Kadisha, and several prominent activists left the organization in protest to form a rival group, HaAguda LeMeniyat Chilul Kvarim, under Rabbi Micha Rothschild, an Elyashiv associate.
Beating of Aryeh Goloventzitz and rabbinic condemnation (2013) The most prolonged internal Haredi controversy of Shmidel's tenure concerned the "Goloventzitz compound" in Ramat Beit Shemesh, a project of roughly 5,500 housing units. After burial caves were discovered in 2012, Rabbi Moshe Sternbuch, the Raavad (Chief Justice) of the Edah HaChareidis, personally inspected the site and ruled that there was no halachic problem with construction because the burials were not Jewish. Shmidel and Asra Kadisha rejected the ruling and launched a multi-year campaign against the developers and against Sternbuch personally.
On the night of 2 Elul 5773 (August 7, 2013), eight men identifying themselves as members of Asra Kadisha entered the Bayit Vegan home of developer Aryeh Goloventzitz by impersonating charity collectors. According to the developer's testimony, after he invited them in to make a donation, they beat him in front of his wife and daughter with a blunt object, fracturing his skull, and warned him: "This is only a first visit — the next will be worse." Goloventzitz was hospitalized for 14 hours at Hadassah Medical Center. Goloventzitz later told Bechadrei Chareidim that the attackers shouted at him that he was a rasha merusha ("wicked and evil") specifically for following Sternbuch's ruling rather than Shmidel's. When Goloventzitz subsequently visited Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky in Bnei Brak, Kanievsky's blessing — recorded on video by Kikar HaShabbat — was the unusually pointed phrase: "Hashem should help you escape from them."
The Israel Police subsequently raided several homes in Mea Shearim to arrest the attackers. Asra Kadisha-aligned protesters smashed the windows of police vehicles entering the neighborhood and shouted "Nazis, get out of here" at officers. Wider riots tied to the Asra Kadisha protests in Beit Shemesh led to 29 arrests, the torching of garbage containers, the setting of a forest fire adjacent to the construction site, and attacks on firefighters who arrived to extinguish it.
On 20 August 2013, Rabbis Chaim Kanievsky and Nissim Karelitz — two of the most senior Lithuanian Haredi authorities of the period — issued an unusually sharp public letter condemning Asra Kadisha. They called the organization's activists "inshi delo ma'ali" (, "worthless people") who "have opened their mouths and their tongues against one of the great Torah sages of our generation", and prayed that they would "fully repent". Rabbis from the neighborhood of Har Nof, where Sternbuch lived — including representatives of Ger, Vizhnitz, the Bostoner Rebbe, and the roshei yeshiva of Hebron Yeshiva and Pachad Yitzchak — signed a parallel letter of condemnation.
The engineering supervisor Rabbi Zalman Menachem Koren told Bechadrei Chareidim that he had personally driven the elderly Sternbuch to inspect the site. While they were still in the car returning to Jerusalem, an Asra Kadisha activist phoned Koren mockingly asking what Sternbuch had concluded — proving the rabbi's vehicle had been under surveillance. Koren described Asra Kadisha's deputy chairman Chezki Kalmanovich as a "bully who took over Asra Kadisha". Asra Kadisha also organized propaganda posters in Jerusalem and Beit Shemesh labeling buyers in the project shaknak — a Hebrew acronym for "dwellers of graves" — and Asra Kadisha-aligned figures called for buyers to be placed under a cherem (formal ban).
The developer Rabbi Yitzchak Pirer told Bechadrei Chareidim that Asra Kadisha had demanded 200 million shekels for the engineering modifications it sought to impose, which would have added approximately 150,000 shekels to the cost of each apartment, and described Asra Kadisha activists as "charlatans". In February 2019, after roughly seven years of conflict and once residents had begun moving into the project, Kanievsky issued a handwritten ruling stating that "the place is certainly fit for the residence of kohenim and God-fearing people" — effectively rejecting Asra Kadisha's position in writing. A 2024 arbitration ruling reported by Globes ordered the developer Nof Tzurim to pay the Goloventzitz family 68.5 million shekels in compensation tied to delayed payments stemming from the project.
Allegations of "protection money": the 2013 Walla! investigation On 2 September 2013, Walla! news published an undercover investigation by Yaki Adamker and Yehoshua Breiner titled "Haredi Protection: Pay and You Can Build on Graves". Using hidden cameras, the report alleged that Haredi workers operating in coordination with Asra Kadisha at a quarry near Ramla were quietly exhuming bones believed by some to be Jewish for paying developers, even as Asra Kadisha was publicly leading violent riots against similar work in Beit Shemesh where developers refused to pay. The reporters wrote that the workers fled the site when they saw cameras and returned only after the cameras were turned off.
The report named Mendel Eckstein as the operator on site, and identified Chezki Kalmanovich — Asra Kadisha's deputy chairman and presumed successor to Shmidel — as supervising the work. Asked to respond, Shmidel told Walla!: "Our people have no connection to the excavations at the quarry in Ramla", while conceding that Eckstein "operates from time to time under our direction".
Two named former insiders gave on-the-record statements. Aharaleh Yaktor, a former Asra Kadisha activist who had left to establish a rival organization, described Asra Kadisha as "an organization of murderers... if you refuse to pay, they will make your life miserable, demonstrate under your house, threaten your children, and do everything to stop the work." Yaktor also described a price list he said he had heard from a secular developer: "Got a million dollars? They evacuate two graves every Monday. Got only half a million? They build arches. Nothing? They send protesters with water bottles." Shalom Frid, a Ministry of Religious Affairs adviser on grave matters who had previously worked with Asra Kadisha for 28 years, said: "It's an organization without rules. Whoever decides is Rabbi Shmidel himself, and when he needs to, he permits himself." Frid also accused Asra Kadisha of burying excavated bones in building foundations in violation of Israeli law, which requires bones to be transferred to the Ministry of Religious Affairs.
In a separate 2011 op-ed in Kikar HaShabbat, Yaktor accused Shmidel of pressuring detained protesters not to sign release agreements, ignoring the tears of arrestees' children, and promising taxi fare to released protesters that was never paid. Yaktor further alleged that Shmidel's circle had planned for the Rachmastrivka Rebbe to be physically attacked during a protest in order to provoke wider unrest, and had asked Yaktor not to coordinate the Rebbe's arrival with police. Yaktor also alleged that Shmidel had sent him personally to take possession of desecrated burial land in Nazareth, but that the organization lost interest in the operation because it was not useful for its public profile.
Abu Kabir protocol: alleged hypocrisy on excavation (2009–2011) In May 2011, Kikar HaShabbat published the minutes of a 28 June 2009 meeting at the Israel Antiquities Authority, supplied by Yaktor. The minutes recorded that the meeting was held at the request of Shmidel personally, and stated its stated purpose verbatim as "the request of Rabbi Schmidel from Shuka Dorfman that the Antiquities Authority excavate Jewish graves on the relevant land for the purpose of public display." The land in question was the ancient Jewish cemetery at Abu Kabir in Jaffa. Other rabbis, including Israel's Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, had publicly opposed the excavation. The reported request appeared to contradict Asra Kadisha's stated public position prohibiting any disturbance of Jewish graves.
Yedioth Ahronoth investigation: infrastructure capture (2011) A separate investigation by Guy Lieberman in the Yedioth Ahronoth weekend supplement 7 Yamim, summarized in Bechadrei Chareidim, alleged that Asra Kadisha under Shmidel had captured significant influence over Israeli infrastructure planning. The report documented Asra Kadisha's role in delaying construction of Israel's Highway 6, the doubling of the Tel Aviv–Be'er Sheva railway near Ramla, an industrial expansion in Shoham, and infrastructure projects in Yehud, Akko, and Kibbutz Parod. Then-chairman of Israel Railways Yaakov Efrati told the paper: "[Asra Kadisha] is not a public body, but it decides... Until we reached agreements with them last year, it was impossible to continue work, and that caused, in my estimation, a six-month delay." Ramla mayor Yoel Lavi was quoted: "It cannot be that Asra Kadisha will dictate to an entire city to be stuck in a traffic jam." A construction manager described being summoned to the office of the Israel Railways chairman to find Shmidel and former Knesset member Meir Porush waiting there: "The feeling was of a kangaroo court."
The same report alleged that Asra Kadisha maintained an internal intelligence network of informants inside the Israel Antiquities Authority, enabling its activists to arrive at sensitive sites with unusual speed. The report also alleged that, several months after Shalom Frid was hired by the Ministry of Religious Affairs as an external consultant on grave issues, the mobile phone he used was paid for by Asra Kadisha — raising the question of whether the regulator had been captured by the organization he was meant to regulate.
Barzilai Medical Center crisis (2009–2010)