Summary
Haim Cohn, in Lahav’s account: Israel’s attorney general through the 1950s, who insisted Rudolf Kasztner sue Gruenvald or resign and then prosecuted Gruenvald for criminal libel, setting the Kasztner Trial in motion; later a Supreme Court justice reputed as a civil libertarian, the lone dissenter in Yeredor and the leader of the secular majority in Shalit (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1471-1732, 2102-2551).
Details
- Born in Germany in an ultra-Orthodox home, Cohn arrived in Palestine in the early 1930s as an anti-Zionist, joined Rav Kook’s yeshivah, “converted from Orthodoxy to Zionism”, became a firm secularist and a close associate of Ben-Gurion; as attorney general he was, in Lahav’s words, a loyal government servant who never admitted he had erred in prosecuting Gruenvald (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1471-1560).
- As attorney general he had defended the army in Al-Couri; as a justice he held in Qardosh (1960) that “absolute discretion” left the Court unable to intervene however arbitrary the registrar’s decision — the purist positivism Simon Agranat rejected — yet in 1964 he had also held Al-Ard should be denied incorporation (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 2102-2271).
- In Yeredor Cohn was ready with a written opinion before the justices’ consultations, breaching the Court’s unwritten code; he argued the Elections Law authorised no substantive ban and the rule of law required explicit statutory power (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 2102-2271).
- In Shalit Cohn applied a subjective test of Jewishness; born and raised ultra-Orthodox and groomed under Rav Kook, he had severed his ties with Orthodoxy, defied halakhic rules in 1966 by marrying a divorcée, and in the late 1950s authored the Interior Ministry’s “Who Is a Jew” regulations whose self-determination criteria precipitated the crisis in which Ben-Gurion consulted fifty intellectuals. Agranat had always defended him against religious pressure to resign or recuse (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 2272-2551).
- He planned an intimate farewell party at his home for Agranat in September 1976 (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 2792-2861).
Related pages
Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, Simon Agranat, Kasztner Trial, Yeredor Case, Shalit Case, Qardosh Case