1. Menachem Elon was an Israeli jurist and Professor of Law specializing in traditional Jewish Law, an Orthodox rabbi, and a prolific author on traditional Jewish law.
20 Facts About Menachem Elon
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Menachem Elon was the head of the Jewish Law Institute of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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Menachem Elon lost the 1983 Israeli Presidential Election to Chaim Herzog.
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Menachem Elon's family fled to the Netherlands a year before Nazism's ascent in Germany.
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Menachem Elon was among the founders of a yeshiva high school Midrashiat Noam in Pardes Hanna, and served for two years as a teacher there, and became one of the founders of the religious Kibbutz Tirat Zvi in the Beit She'an Valley.
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In 1949, Menachem Elon married Ruth Buchsbaum, the daughter of Dr Mordechai Buchsbaum, an Orthodox Jewish attorney and a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem.
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Menachem Elon earned his diploma from the Tel Aviv School of Law and Economics in 1948.
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Menachem Elon served as a guest lecturer at the Faculty of Law at Oxford University, University College of London, McGill University, and University of Pennsylvania, and as a visiting professor at Harvard University School of Law and at New York University School of Law.
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In 1963, Menachem Elon was appointed head of the Institute for Research in Jewish Law at the Hebrew University, where he edited 10 volumes of The Annual of the Institute for Research in Jewish Law, as well as a digest of the response of the medieval authorities.
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Menachem Elon played a pivotal role in the Mishpat Ivri movement.
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In 1955, he was appointed senior assistant to the Attorney General of Israel Haim Cohn, and from 1959 to 1966, Menachem Elon served as adviser on Jewish Law to the Israel Ministry of Justice, a job which included writing legal opinions based on Jewish law regarding every law proposed in Knesset.
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Menachem Elon was a member of numerous Israeli Public Inquiry committees, and he served on committees to prepare legal proposals in various fields of civil law.
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In 1979, Menachem Elon was awarded the Israel Prize for Hebrew law.
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Menachem Elon emerged as a prominent critic of former president of the Supreme Court Aharon Barak's judicial activism.
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Menachem Elon was involved in a number of important verdicts, including the acquittal of Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk.
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Menachem Elon served in this position until his retirement in 1993 after 16 years as a justice; he was succeeded as deputy president by Aharon Barak.
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Menachem Elon headed a number of non-profit organizations, and sat on the boards of others.
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Menachem Elon continued to write and teach at universities around the world.
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In 1992, Menachem Elon wrote the "Jerusalem Covenant" - a mosaic dealing with the centrality of Jerusalem in Jewish life - signed on the 25th Jerusalem Day.
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Menachem Elon died in Jerusalem on February 6,2013, and was buried in Har HaMenuchot.