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.

Biography

Early life

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 Rayna Batya Miriam Berlin (née Epshtein). Bar-Ilan's father was the head of the famous Volozhin Yeshiva in Lithuania. Bar-Ilan was also a descendant of Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen, the Maharam of Padua.

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.

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.