September 26, 2002
Rabbi Zerach Warhaftig, a founder of Israel’s National Religious Party and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, dies at age 96 in Jerusalem.
Born in what is now Belarus, Warhaftig became involved in the religious Zionist Mizrahi movement in his teens in Poland and served as a delegate to the Zionist Congress in the early 1930s.
He studied law at the University of Warsaw and served as a Jewish Agency official in Poland. At the beginning of World War II, Warhaftig went to Lithuania, where he led a delegation that in 1940 approached Japanese Consul Chiune Sugihara and asked him to issue visas for Jews trying to leave Lithuania. Sugihara issued 3,500 visas in defiance of his government and thus saved many Jews from the Nazis.
Warhaftig moved to Israel in 1947 and served in the Knesset from 1949 to 1981 and as minister of religious affairs from 1961 to 1974.
