17 Facts About Meir Bar-Ilan

Meir Bar-Ilan was an orthodox rabbi, author, and religious Zionist activist, who served as leader of the Mizrachi movement in the United States and Mandatory Palestine.

Meir Bar-Ilan's father was the head of the famous Volozhin Yeshiva in Lithuania.

Meir Bar-Ilan 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.

Meir Bar-Ilan was deeply influenced by the local religious community and its philosophy of Torah im Derech Eretz.

In 1905 Meir 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.

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

Meir Bar-Ilan was 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.

From 1920 through 1922, Meir Bar-Ilan briefly served as acting president for what is Yeshiva University during the temporary absence of its then-president, Bernard Revel.

In Palestine, Meir 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.

Meir Bar-Ilan 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.

Meir Bar-Ilan 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.

At the beginning of 1943, Meir Bar-Ilan visited the United States to lobby the American government to rescue Jewish refugees and help establish a Jewish state.

Meir Bar-Ilan 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.

Meir Bar-Ilan wrote articles on Talmudic subjects for various periodicals.

Meir Bar-Ilan 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.

Meir Bar-Ilan inspired the founding of Meir 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, as well as streets in several other Israeli cities.