Rabbi Meir Kahane
Rabbi Meir KahaneFlash 90

Hundreds of followers of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane gathered at the Heichal David event hall in Jerusalem Thursday evening to mark the 29th anniversary of the rabbi’s assassination.

Relatives of the slain rabbi - including his widow, Libby Kahane, and grandson, Meir Ettinger – spoke at the gathering, along with Rabbi Yisrael Ariel, the founder of the Temple Institute, as well as activists and candidates from the Otzma Yehudit party, including Itamar Ben-Gvir, Michael Ben-Ari, and Baruch Marzel.

Rabbi Meir Kahane was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1932, and after receiving rabbinical ordination at Mir Yeshiva, took up a position as a pulpit rabbi in Queens, New York.

A life-long Zionist activist, Rabbi Kahane founded the Jewish Defense League in 1968, with the aim of protecting Jews in the US from anti-Semitism, and agitating on behalf of Soviet Jews barred from emigrating out of the USSR.

In 1971, Rabbi Kahane immigrated to Israel, where he established the Kach party, which called for the transfer of Israel’s Arab population out of the country, and the application of Israeli sovereignty over Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip.

Rabbi Kahane was elected to the Knesset in 1984 with the Kach party, but was banned from running in the 1988 elections after the Knesset Central Elections Committee deemed Kach’s platform racist, citing a 1985 law passed barring parties which espouse racism from running for the Knesset.

In November 1990, Rabbi Kahane was gunned down in New York City during an address which was part of a speaking tour in the US calling on American Jews to immigrate en masse to Israel.

The assassin, Sayyid Nosair, was later found to have links to Osama Bin Laden, founder of the Al Qaeda terrorist organization.

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