Meir David Loewenstein
Israeli politician
Meir David Loewenstein (Hebrew: מאיר-דוד לוונשטיין; 1 June 1904 – 15 August 1995) was an Israeli politician and one of the signatories of the Israeli declaration of independence.
Biography
Born in Copenhagen in Denmark in 1904, Loewenstein studied at a business school in Switzerland and a rabbinical seminary in Amsterdam, Netherlands. During his youth he became involved in the European Agudat Yisrael youth movement, of which he later became chairman.
After emigrating to Mandatory Palestine in 1934, he remained active in Agudat Yisrael. As a prominent member of the organisation, Loewenstein became a member of Moetzet HaAm (later the Provisional State Council), and signed Israel's declaration of independence in 1948. However, he later claimed:
It ignored our sole right to Eretz Israel, which is based on the covenant of the Lord with Abraham, our father, and repeated promises in the Tanach. It ignored the aliya of the Ramban and the students of the Vilna Gaon and the Ba'al Shem Tov, and the [rights of] Jews who lived in the 'Old Yishuv'.
He was elected to the Knesset in the country's first elections in 1949 as a member of the United Religious Front, an alliance of the four major religious parties. However, he lost his seat in the 1951 elections.
Loewenstein rejected the idea of a constitution for Israel, stating:
If it contradicts the Torah of Israel, it is a revolt against the Almighty; if it is identical with the Torah, it is superfluous.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Meir David Loewenstein” is israeli politician. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Meir, David and Loewenstein, not as a finished interpretation.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 8, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q2908216. VIAF identifies the subject as 4952168596728830450004. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1904, 1995, 1934 and 1948.
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This entry incorporates text from “Meir David Loewenstein” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.