Meir Bar-Ilan

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For other uses, see Bar-Ilan (disambiguation).
Rabbi
Meir Bar-Ilan
University of Berlin
Signature
OrganisationMizrachi
BuriedSanhedria Cemetery

Meir Bar-Ilan (Hebrew: מֵאִיר בַּר-אִילָן; (1880-04-10)April 10, 1880 – (1949-04-17)April 17, 1949) was an orthodox rabbi, author, and religious zionist activist, who served as leader of the Mizrachi movement in the United States and Mandatory Palestine. Bar-Ilan University, founded in 1955, was named in his honour.

Biography

Early life

Bar-Ilan (standing, second from right) with members of his family.

Bar-Ilan was born Meir Berlin in 1880 to a

Meir Katzenellenbogen, the Maharam of Padua.[2]

He studied at the Volozhin Yeshiva and, after his father's death in 1894, at the traditional yeshivas of

University of Berlin. There, he became acquainted with a more modern form of Orthodox Judaism that had a more tolerant attitude to secular education and to political Zionism (although such attitudes were also present in the Lithuania of his youth). Bar-Ilan was deeply influenced by the local religious community and its philosophy of Torah im Derech Eretz.[3]

Mizrachi movement and Ha’Ivri

In 1905 Bar-Ilan joined the

British East Africa, as suggested by Great Britain.[4]

In 1911, he founded the Hebrew weekly newspaper Ha’Ivri in Berlin as a "non-party paper dedicated to all the affairs of Israel, faithful in its spirit to our religious tradition and to our national renaissance."[5] That same year, Bar-Ilan was appointed secretary of the world Mizrachi movement. In 1913 he came to the United States and developed local Mizrachi groups into a national organisation, chairing the first American Mizrachi convention, held in Cincinnati in May 1914.[6]

Bar-Ilan settled in New York in 1914, becoming president of the American Mizrachi movement the following year, a position he held until 1928.

S. Y. Agnon, Joseph Opatoshu, Reuben Brainin, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, and Yehuda Leib Maimon.[5] Bar-Ilan was also an active member of the Joint Distribution Committee during World War I, and served as vice president of the Central Relief Committee of New York City in 1916. He founded the Mizrachi Teachers Institute in 1917. From 1920 through 1922, Bar-Ilan briefly served as acting president for what is now Yeshiva University during the temporary absence of its then-president, Bernard Revel
.

Life in Mandate Palestine

Meir Bar-Ilan in 1938
Bar-Ilan with Sephardi chief rabbi Ben-Zion Uziel at a World War II memorial service in 1946.

In 1923 he moved to

halachic topics in the Talmud, forty-two volumes of which have been published to date.[6] Bar-Ilan also served on the board of directors of the Mizrachi Bank and, in 1925, became a member of the Board of Directors of the Jewish National Fund, devoted to financing the rebuilding of the Jewish homeland in the then-British Mandate of Palestine
.

He was a vocal opponent of the 1937

Jews with the British.[7]

At the beginning of 1943, Bar-Ilan visited the United States to lobby the American government to rescue

Jewish refugees and help establish a Jewish state. He secured meetings with leading politicians and foreign ambassadors, including Vice President Henry Wallace, Senator Robert Wagner, Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley, and House Minority Leader Joseph Martin.[6]

Scholarship

Along with Rabbi Shlomo Yosef Zevin, Bar-Ilan was the editor of the Talmudical Encyclopedia (Hebrew: אנציקלופדיה תלמודית), Volumes I (Jerusalem, 1946) and II (published posthumously in 1949).[8] He also wrote articles on Talmudic subjects for various periodicals. Notable works of Bar-Ilan include:

  • Eretz Yisroel in der milḥome un nokh der milḥome (
    Yiddish
    : ארץ ישראל אין דער מלחמה און נאָך דער מלחמה; New York, 1934)
  • Fun Volozhin biz Yerushalayim (
    Yiddish
    : פון וואָלאָז'ין בּיז ירושלים; in Yiddish, New York, 1933; in Hebrew, Tel Aviv, 1939–40), autobiography in two volumes
  • Bishvil ha-Techiah (Tel Aviv, 1940)
  • Raban shel Yisrael (Hebrew: רבן של ישראל; New York, 1943)

After 1948, his activities were scholastically oriented. He organized a committee of scholars to examine the legal problems of the new state in the light of Jewish law and founded an institute for the publication of a new complete edition of the Talmud.

Legacy

Bar-Ilan inspired the founding of

Hebron Hills and Bar-Ilan Street
in Jerusalem, as well as streets in several other Israeli cities.

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Meir Bar-Ilan.
  1. ISBN 978-0-89906-492-5
    .
  2. ISBN 978-0-9610578-4-8
    .
  3. ^ "Mizrachi Biography Series: Rav Meir Bar Ilan [Berlin] (1880-1949)". Mizrachi World Movement. Archived from the original on 21 February 2017. Retrieved 22 January 2019.
  4. ^ a b "Meir Bar-Ilan (1880–1949)". JewishAgency. Retrieved 2 October 2013.
  5. ^
    JSTOR 23877771
    .
  6. ^ a b c Medoff, Rafael (Fall 2014). "Rabbi Meir Bar-Ilan: Forgotten Pioneer of Jewish Activism". Jewish Action.
  7. ^ Kaplan, Zvi (2007). "Bar-Ilan (Berlin), Meir". Encyclopaedia Judaica. Thomson Gale. Retrieved 22 January 2019.
  8. ^ Fendel, Hillel (20 April 2009). "Talmudic Encyclopedia Head Dies". Arutz Sheva.

External links

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