Meir Bar-Ilan

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.

For other uses, see Bar-Ilan (disambiguation).
Rabbi

Meir Bar-Ilan
Personal
Born
Meir Berlin

(1880-04-10)April 10, 1880
Volozhin, Russian Empire
DiedApril 17, 1949(1949-04-17) (aged 69)
Jerusalem
ReligionJudaism
SpouseBaila Rabinowitz
Parents
DenominationOrthodox Judaism
Alma materVolozhin Yeshiva
University of Berlin
OrganisationMizrachi
BuriedSanhedria Cemetery

Biography

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

Bar-Ilan was born Meir Berlin in 1880 to a Lithuanian Jewish family, the youngest son of Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin and his second wife Batya Miriam Berlin (née Epshtein). Bar-Ilan's father was the head of the famous Volozhin Yeshiva in Lithuania.[1] Bar-Ilan was also a descendant of Rabbi 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 Telshe, Brisk and Novardok, where he learned with his maternal grandfather, Rabbi Yechiel Michel Epstein. After gaining semicha in 1902 at the age of twenty-two, Bar-Ilan travelled to Germany to attend the 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 Mizrachi movement, representing it at the Seventh Zionist Congress, at which he voted against the Uganda Proposal to create a temporary Jewish homeland in 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.[4] In his absence Ha’Ivri ceased publication in April 1914, but was re-established under Bar-Ilan's direction in New York in January 1916. Published until 1921, the paper's contributors included such prominent writers as 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 Israel
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 Jerusalem. In Israel, Bar-Ilan founded the daily newspaper Hatzofeh and initiated the Encyclopedia Talmudit, a Hebrew encyclopedia summarizing 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 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine and the 1939 British White Paper, and advocated civil disobedience and non-cooperation by the 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, Yew 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 Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan by the American Mizrachi movement, named in his honour. The moshav Beit Meir is named in his honour, as are the Meir Forest in the Hebron Hills and Bar-Ilan Street in Jerusalem.

References
  1. Epstein, Baruch HaLevi (1988). My Uncle the Netziv. ArtScroll Mesorah Publications. ISBN 978-0-89906-492-5.
  2. Rosenstein, Neil (1990). The Unbroken Chain: Biographical Sketches and Genealogy of Illustrious Jewish Families from the 15th-20th Century. 1, 2 (revised ed.). New York: CIS Publishers. ISBN 978-0-9610578-4-8.
  3. "Mizrachi Biography Series: Rav Meir Bar Ilan [Berlin] (1880-1949)". Mizrachi World Movement. Retrieved 22 January 2019.
  4. "Meir Bar-Ilan (1880–1949)". JewishAgency. Retrieved 2 October 2013.
  5. Brown, Michael Gary (December 1969). "All, All Alone: The Hebrew Press in America from 1914 to 1924". American Jewish Historical Quarterly. 59 (2): 139–178. JSTOR 23877771.
  6. 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.
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