Rabbi Meir David HaKohen Kahane, Hy”d

(1 August 1932 – 5 November 1990 / 28 Tammuz 5692 – 18 Cheshvan 5751)

Rabbi Meir Kahane was not a “controversial figure.” He was a navi of Jewish strength in an age of Jewish weakness. He taught that Ahavat Yisrael without Barzel is sentimentality, that “Never Again” without the will to fight is a lie, and that a Jewish state that is afraid to be Jewish will not remain a Jewish state. JDL 613 exists because that teaching is still true.

What follows is his life as Kahanists understand it: a Torah Jew who refused to live as a victim, who built an army of pride out of American Jewish boys the establishment had written off, who forced the Soviet empire to open the gates, who told the truth about the Arab question in Eretz Yisrael, and who was murdered for it.

Blood and Home

Meir David Kahane was born Martin David Kahane on 1 August 1932 in Flatbush, Brooklyn, eldest son of Rabbi Yechezkel Shraga (Charles) Kahane and Sonia Trainin Kahane. His father was born in Tzfat in 1905, from a family that had come to the Land in the 1870s at the call of the Sanzer Rebbe. Charles Kahane was an Orthodox rav, a translator of Torah into English for American Jews who no longer knew how to read it, head of the Flatbush rabbinical board, and a Revisionist. Jabotinsky’s people sat at that Shabbat table. Relatives had already been murdered on the road to Tzfat in 1938 and in the 1929 riots. Other kin died in the ovens. The boy did not grow up on abstractions. He grew up knowing that Jews who cannot defend themselves are buried by Jews who talk.

His brother Nachman later served the State of Israel in the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Meir himself stuttered as a child and crushed the stutter by force of will — the same will he later demanded of a people that had learned to mumble.

In 1946 he entered Betar. In 1947, when British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin — the man starving Jewish survivors on Cyprus and turning refugee ships back to Europe — came to New York, the fifteen-year-old Kahane and his comrades met him with vegetables and broken glass. That was not “hooliganism.” That was the first public act of a Jew who had decided the age of cringing was over.

Torah, Law, and a Wife Who Stood With Him

He learned in Yeshiva of Flatbush and the Brooklyn Talmudical Academy, then at Mir Brooklyn under Rav Avraham Kalmanowitz, who gave him semicha. By night he took a B.A. from Brooklyn College (1954), an LL.B. from New York Law School, and an M.A. in international law from NYU (1957). He was a rav who could read a sugya and a statute. The establishment later called him a demagogue because they could not answer either.

On 3 June 1956 he married Libby Blum, a Bnei Akiva girl of substance. They raised four children — Tzipporah, Tova, Baruch, and Binyamin Ze’ev (born 3 October 1966). Libby was not an accessory. She made aliyah with him, raised the children in Jerusalem, worked as a reference librarian at the National Library for decades, and then wrote the only serious life of her husband, Rabbi Meir Kahane: His Life and Thought. A movement that produces such a wife is not a cult of rage. It is a house.

He served a pulpit in Howard Beach until the congregation preferred comfort to Torah. He wrote for The Jewish Press for nearly thirty years — the only mass Orthodox paper that would print what every honest Jew already knew. Under the name Michael King he did the dirty work American Jews needed done and would not admit: anti-communist work, Vietnam advocacy, even informing on the antisemitic John Birch Society. Kahane never pretended the enemies of the Jews were only on the left.

1968: The Jewish Defense League

By 1968 the American Jewish street was bleeding. Elderly Jews were beaten in changing neighborhoods. Synagogues were vandalized. Black nationalist rhetoric named Jews as the enemy. The Conference of Presidents issued statements. Kahane issued patrols.

In May 1968 he and a handful of men placed an ad in The Jewish Press: Jewish survival was not a seminar. The Jewish Defense League was born. Its first mission was simple and Torah-true: if they come to kill you, rise up and kill them first (*Sanhedrin* 72a). “Never Again” was not poetry. It was a vow that the next time a Jew was hunted, other Jews would be armed, trained, and present.

The Five Principles — the same ones JDL 613 lives by — were not a branding exercise. They were a reconstruction of the Jew:

- Ahavat Yisrael — love of Jews that places the Jewish people first, not last after every fashionable cause.

- Hadar — pride. Walk like a son of Avraham, not like a guest in someone else’s country.

- Barzel — iron. Learn to fight. Better to know how and not need it than need it and not know how.

- Mishmaat — discipline and unity. A people that cannot take orders cannot win wars.

- Bitachon — trust in Hashem and in the eternity of Israel, which is not the same as waiting for the State Department.

Training camps taught krav and firearms. Neighborhoods that had been hunting grounds became no-go zones for the predators. The ADL and the Federations called it vigilantism. The Jews who could sleep through the night called it overdue.

Soviet Jewry: The Campaign That Worked

Then Kahane did what the respectable organizations had failed to do for twenty years: he made the imprisonment of Soviet Jews an American crisis. JDL men picketed the Soviet mission, shut down Aeroflot, put rats in theaters hosting Soviet companies, and struck Soviet property. Washington panicked that “Jewish extremists” would ruin détente. That was the point. An empire that could ignore rabbis in suits could not ignore Jews who made the cost of silence higher than the cost of exit visas.

Kahane was arrested, prosecuted, and placed on federal probation for firearms offenses. He did not apologize. Tens of thousands of Soviet Jews later walked out of the prison-state. The people who write history from foundation grants still pretend it was only Jackson-Vanik and quiet diplomacy. The Jews who got out know better.

Aliyah: A Rabbi Who Lived What He Preached

In 1971 Rabbi Kahane, Libby, and the four children made aliyah. He did not found a think tank in Manhattan and lecture Israelis on morality. He moved. In Eretz Yisrael he founded Kach — “Thus.” Not “dialogue.” Not “process.” Thus: this Land is the Jewish inheritance; a Jewish state that surrenders Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, or that grants national rights to a population whose charter is Jewish disappearance, is committing suicide with a democratic smile.

He said the Arabs of the Land who will not accept Jewish sovereignty must leave — with compensation if they go in peace, without it if they choose war. He wrote it in They Must Go from a cell in Ramle, under administrative detention, the same tool the state had reserved for Arab terrorists until a Jew told the truth too clearly. He was arrested more than sixty times. That is what happens when a government fears its own voters more than its enemies.

In 1984 Kach entered the Knesset. For four years one man said in the parliament of Israel what half the country whispered: transfer is not racism; it is the logic of a nation that intends to remain a nation. In 1985–88 the Labor–Likud establishment changed the law to throw him out — an amendment aimed at one Jew because his platform was winning. They called it “incitement to racism.” Kahane called it the moment the Jewish state decided it was more afraid of Jewish strength than of Arab demography. He was right about the demography. The decades since have not refuted him. They have illustrated him.

In 1987 he founded Yeshivat HaRa’ayon HaYehudi — the Yeshiva of the Jewish Idea — so that Torah and Jewish nationalism would be one study, not two departments. His son Binyamin Ze’ev taught there, wrote Darka Shel Torah, and later led Kahane Chai when the father was gone.

The Books That Still Accuse Us

Read them. Do not outsource the reading to a hit piece.

- Never Again! — the program: pride, aliyah, self-defense, an end to the galut personality.

- Why Be Jewish? — intermarriage and assimilation as a silent Holocaust the Federations will not name.

- They Must Go — the only demographic plan that treats Jewish survival as non-negotiable.

- Uncomfortable Questions for Comfortable Jews — exactly what the title says.

- The Jewish Idea (Or HaRa’ayon) — the Torah architecture under the politics.

He wrote for thirty years in The Jewish Press so that ordinary Jews would hear a rav who did not need their donations enough to lie to them.

Murdered in New York, Buried in Jerusalem

On 5 November 1990, at the Marriott East Side in Manhattan, Rabbi Kahane finished speaking to Orthodox Jews about aliyah. El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian Islamist later tied to the network that bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, walked up and shot him in the neck. That was not “random violence.” It was the same war Kahane had named: a jihad that does not distinguish between a rabbi in Brooklyn and a child in Sderot. Nosair wounded a postal inspector while fleeing and was taken. The first American blood of that network was Kahane’s.

He was buried on Har HaMenuchot. The streets of Jerusalem filled. The same Israeli politicians who had banned his party discovered, too late, that you cannot ban a diagnosis.

Ten years later, on 31 December 2000, his youngest son — Rabbi Binyamin Ze’ev Kahane, husband of Talia, father of six, rosh yeshiva of the Jewish Idea — was murdered with his wife on the road to Ofra. Five of the children were in the van. Palestinian gunmen finished the sentence the father had begun to write: the war against this family was the war against Jewish sovereignty in the heart of the Land. JDL 613 names both men. A movement that orphans children and then asks the orphans to be “moderate” has no moral standing.

What He Demands of Us Now

Kahane’s enemies called him a racist because he refused the only racism the modern West still permits: the demand that Jews alone live as a minority in their own country, apologize for winning, and outsource their survival to the people who chant for their death.

He was a Kohen who believed the Torah is not a therapy language. He believed Jewish blood is not cheaper than anyone else’s. He believed the Holocaust did not end in 1945; it waits for the generation that forgets how to punch. He believed Never Again is a mitzvah, and a mitzvah that is not performed is a chillul Hashem.

JDL 613 does not study him as nostalgia. We study him as standing orders:

Love Jews more than you love being liked.

Carry yourself with Hadar.

Train Barzel.

Accept Mishmaat.

Live Bitachon — and then act, because faith that never becomes a fist is not the faith of David.

Am Yisrael Chai.

Never Again means we fight back.