Hillel Kook
| Hillel Kook | |
|---|---|
| Date of birth | 24 July 1915 |
| Place of birth | Kriukai, Russian Empire |
| Year of aliyah | 1924 |
| Date of death | 18 August 2001 (aged 86) |
| Knessets | 1 |
| Faction represented in Knesset | |
| 1949–1951 | Herut |
| 1951 | Independent |
Hillel Kook (Hebrew: הלל קוק, 24 July 1915 –18 August 2001), also known as Peter Bergson (Hebrew: פיטר ברגסון), was a Revisionist Zionist activist, politician, and prominent member of the Irgun.
Hillel Kook was born in Kriukai in the Russian Empire (today in Lithuania) in 1915, the son of Rabbi Dov Kook, the younger brother of Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of the British Mandate in Palestine. In 1924, his family immigrated to Palestine, where his father became the first Chief Rabbi of Afula. Hillel Kook received a religious education in Afula and at the Religious Zionist Yeshiva Merkaz HaRav in Jerusalem and was an unregistered student of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University. While there, he became a member of Sohba, or "Comradeship", a group of students who would later become prominent in the Revisionist movement, including David Raziel and Avraham Stern.
Kook joined the pre-state Haganah militia in 1930 following widespread Arab riots. In 1931, Kook helped found the Irgun, a group of militant Haganah dissidents, and fought with them in Palestine through most of the 1930s. He served as a post commander in 1936, and eventually became a member of the Irgun General Headquarters.
In 1937 Kook began his career as an international spokesperson for the Irgun and Revisionist Zionism. He first went to Poland, where he was involved in fundraising and establishing Irgun cells in Eastern Europe. It was there that he met the founder of the Revisionist movement, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, and became friends with his son Ari. At the founders' request, Kook traveled to the United States with Jabotinsky in 1940, where he soon served as the head of the Irgun and revisionist mission in America, following the elder's death in August. This assignment was clandestine, and Kook publicly denied he was affiliated with the Irgun many times while in America.
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