Moshe Ber Beck

Moshe Ber Beck, or Moshe Dov Beck (Hebrew: משה דוב בעק‎; born May 17, 1934), is a leader of one of the Neturei Karta branches in the United States.

Moshe Ber Beck was born in Budapest, Hungary. His early childhood was spent hiding with his brother from Nazi persecution until 1945, when Soviet troops took Budapest. In 1948, he migrated to Bnei Brak, Israel, where he began yeshiva studies. In 1959, he married, and at that time joined Neturei Karta, leaving the Vizhnitz Hasidic movement of which he had formerly been a part. He left Israel in 1970 because, he said, of his strong opposition to Zionism, and has since lived in Monsey, New York, where he has been working as a rabbi and anti-Zionist activist.

Moshe Ber Beck, along with other rabbis such as Yisroel Dovid Weiss, is known as a Haredi opponent of Zionism. He is currently one of the leaders of Neturei Karta in the U.S. Among other activities, he participated in a visit to Iran in 2006, where he met with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to publicize Haredi opposition to Zionism. Beck has denounced what he considers a political use of the Holocaust by what he calls the Zionist establishment. In 2014, he appeared in a lengthy interview on the documentary, Judaism in the Era of Zionism, in which he laid out his anti-Zionist viewpoint.

Beck's opposition to Zionism is based, he says, upon the works of Joel Teitelbaum, especially Vayoel Moshe, a lengthy work which aims to demonstrate that Jews are commanded by the Torah to remain in exile until redeemed by the messiah, and are therefore prohibited to establish an independent country.