Rabbi Meir Kahana died on the 17th of Cheshvan, 5785. His 34th yahrzeit was November 18th, 2024.

Meir David Kahane was a Jewish religious and Israeli nationalist activist who founded the Jewish Defense League (JDL). His controversial nature is a testament to the fact that he has been referred to as both a “visionary hero of the Jewish people” and as a “criminal racist” or “Kahanazi” by his enemies, and there were many.

Kahane was born on August 1, 1932, in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Rabbi Charles Kahane, was involved in the Revisionist Zionist movement and was a close friend of Vladimir Jabotinsky. As a teenager, Meir became active in Betar, the militant revisionist youth movement.

Kahane received a degree in International Law from New York University and a Rabbinic ordination from the Mir Yeshiva in Brooklyn. He edited the Jewish Press and served as a pulpit rabbi and teacher in New York until the mid-1960s.

His life’s work really started in 1968, when he founded the JDL or Jewish Defense League. JDL’s activities were aimed at the self-defense of the Jewish community in Brooklyn against the harassment of Soviet activities in New York as a protest against the treatment of Jews in Russia. Kahane saw many of the poor and elderly Jews living in the inner-city being targeted by criminals; as a result, he set out to change the image of the Jew from “weak and vulnerable” to one of a “mighty fighter, who strikes back fiercely against tyrants.” The JDL’s controversial methods, which sometimes included the threat of actual violence, arguably exacerbated the Black-Jewish tension already present in New York City at the time. The JDL also focused on the plight of Soviet Jewry and Meir Kahane coined the phrases “Never again” and “every Jew a .22” to emphasize that Jews would no longer passively ignore the plight of their Jews in the US or abroad.

While some saw Kahane’s goals as laudable, his actions were often considered criminal. He spent time in jail after being convicted of conspiring to make bombs.

Kahane and his family moved to Israel in 1971, where he founded the pro-Jewish Kach political party to oppose Muslim aggression. The party’s platform called for the annexation of all conquered territories and the forcible removal of all Palestinians. Under the auspices of Kach, Kahane continued to lobby for his beliefs that Israel should become the Jewish homeland and stop empowering anti-Jewish activities. He preferred peace but acknowledged that liberating the Jewish people sometimes included violent methods. For standing against those seeking to murder Jews, he was jailed frequently. So powerful was his biblical vision for Israel that he was the first Jew in Israel ever to be accused of sedition.

Meir Kahane ran for Knesset and lost in 1976 and 1980, but with increasing anti-Semitism in Israel, the rightness of his views became obvious and so he was finally elected in 1984. His pro-Jewish movement continued to grow giving hopes that Israel might finally reclaim its birthright, until, shortly before the 1988 elections, the Globalist-led Labor-Likud coalition in the Knesset, banned the Kach party from running by passing an anti-Kahana amendment to Israel’s Basic Law disqualifying any candidate whose platform included “incitement to racism,” in other words, standing up for Jews and Jewish rights to the Jewish Homeland.

Two years later, on November 5, 1990, Kahane was assassinated in New York City by an Egyptian-born Hamas operative. His murderer was acquitted of the murder on anti-Kahana, anti-Semitic, based ‘technicalities’ on December 21, 1991. In 1995, however, Kahana’s murderer was sentenced to a long term of imprisonment for his involvement in Muslim fundamentalist terror in New York, related to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

During his life, Rabbi Meir Kahane attempted to spread his pro-Jewish message through various forums. He wrote many books, espousing his Bible-based opinions; his most famous work, ‘They Must Go,’ is considered his “magnum opus” by his followers. He also founded a Jerusalem seminary called the “Yeshiva of the Jewish Idea.” The school, which still exists today, attempts to combine traditional Jewish education with pro-Jewish biblical political activism.

Even after his death, Kahane has had a tremendous influence on the Israeli political scene. In March 1994, the Kach party and its offshoot, Kahane Chai (“Kahane Lives”), founded by Kahane’s son Binyamin Zev, were officially designated terrorist organizations by both the Globalist Israeli government and the Globalist Bill Clinton administration in the US State Department. The immediate cause of this designation was the February 1994 attack on the al-Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, in which Kach member Baruch Goldstein shot 34 Muslims in the so-called Cave of the Patriarchs massacre. Jewish settlers in Hebron lauded Goldstein as a hero, viewing his attack as a pre-emptive strike in defense of the burial place of the Jewish patriarchs and matriarchs, and his subsequent death as an act of martyrdom. Kach supported Goldstein’s actions and called him a “hero.” More recently, Binyamin Zev Kahane made waves by condoning Yigal Amir’s 1995 assassination of Globalist Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Binyamin Zev Kahane was murdered by Muslim occupiers in 2001 as he traveled with his family in Samaria. Many Jewish settlers in Samaria, affiliated with Kach or Kahane Chai, have been involved in self-defense confrontations with occupying Muslims in Samaria during the “al-Aqsa intifada.” The Globalist Israel government constantly harasses the Settlers.

In short, Rabbi Meir Kahana was a true Jewish hero who believed in and obeyed the Torah in a world of weak assimilated Jews, anti-Semites, and Globalists. Had Israel heeded his warnings, Israel today would be a Torah-based powerhouse and none of the current woes Israel is confronting would be happening. Indeed, had Israel listened, HaMashiach ben David may well have come by now.

* By John of AllFaith (Rabbi Shlomo Nachman), © November 22, 2024

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