Meir Berlin

Meir Berlin, later Hebraized to Meir Bar-Ilan, (1880 at Volozhin, Russian Empire – 1949 at Jerusalem, Israel) was an Orthodox rabbi and leader of Religious Zionism, the Mizrachi movement in the United States and the British Mandate of Palestine. He inspired the founding of Bar Ilan University in Israel which is named for him. Bar-Ilan's connection to the House of David as a descendant of Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen, the Maharam of Padua, is detailed in The Unbroken Chain.

He was a scholar of Talmud as well as the son of an important Orthodox rabbi, Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin, known as the Netziv, who was the head of the famous Volozhin Yeshiva in Lithuania; and his maternal grandfather was R' Yitzchak ben Chaim. He studied in the traditional yeshivas of Volozhin, Telshe, Brisk and Novardok, where he learned with his grandfather, the renowned Rabbi Yechiel Michel Epstein. Gaining Semicha in 1902, he travelled to Germany where 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, and in his grandfather). There, he attended the University of Berlin.

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