Haim Cohn

Chaim Herman Cohn ( חיים הרמן כהן ) ( born March 11, 1911 in Lübeck, † April 10, 2002 in Jerusalem) was an Israeli lawyer, politician and briefly Minister of Justice.

Biography

Cohn came from a religious Jewish family from Lübeck and was the son of the banker Zeev Wilhelm Cohn (1883-1980) and his wife Miriam (1886-1962), born Carlebach, a daughter of Solomon and Esther Carlebach. He was for a time chairman of the Agudat Jisra'el in Hamburg. In 1930, he immigrated to Palestine and studied a short time, which was founded by Rabbi Kook Yeshiva Merkaz HaRav. Subsequently, he was Chasan ( cantor ) in Me'a She'arim, a neighborhood of Jerusalem. However, he returned to Germany, and graduated in law at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, where he gained a PhD. After his return to Palestine, he was first admitted to the bar in 1936 and opened his own law firm in Jerusalem the following year.

After the establishment of Israel in 1948, he was appointed Head of the Department of Legislation, Ministry of Justice, and soon afterwards the prosecutor. In 1949 he was appointed Director General of the Ministry of Justice and already a year later to the Attorney General and held that post until 1960. In this position, he decided to indictment Malchiel Gruenwald, have led to the beginning of the trial against Rudolf Kasztner his statements.

On June 25, 1952, he was appointed as the successor of Dov Yosef by Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, next to his office as Attorney General and Minister of Justice, although he was no party and no member of the Knesset. However, he held that post only until December 24, 1952 and was then replaced by Pinchas Rosen. Between 1954 and 1976 he was a visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as well as besides from 1956 to 1969 at the University of Tel Aviv.

In 1960 he was appointed a judge of the Supreme Court ( Beit haMishpat ha'Elyon ), where he remained until his adoption into retirement in 1981. At times, he was also vice president of the Supreme Court. Many of his most notable decisions as judges were minority opinion on human rights issues. In one case, he agreed with the majority opinion of the Supreme Court not to, the denied an extremist Arab party the right to run for the Knesset. Later, his position was used in the reverse context, as the Jewish extremists and Rabbi Meir Kahane 's candidacy for the Knesset was banned. In one of his last minority opinions Cohn argued in 1980 against the government's right to expel Palestinian activists from Gaza and the West Bank.

In addition, he acted as a representative of Israel in the UN Human Rights Council as well as a judge at the International Court of Justice ( ICJ) in The Hague. He was also a member of the " T'hila " movement, which fought for secularism in Israel.

For his services he was in 1980 the highest award of the State of Israel, the Israel Prize, awarded. In addition, he has received honorary doctorates by several American universities, such as Georgetown University.

Publications

  • "The Trial and Death of Jesus ", 1968, ISBN 0-87068-432-9
  • "Human Rights in the Bible and Talmud ", 1989, ISBN 965-05-0563-6
  • "Dangerous Halakhah ," Essay
  • " Freeing jewish art from its halakhic shackles ," essay, in: Free Judaism, July 6, 1995
  • "God as legal fiction. Humanists have broken free of the need for god, " essay, in: Free Judaism
  • "Legal fictions ," essay, in: Free Judaism
  • " In spite of everything - tolerance", Essay, in: Free Judaism
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