Zorach Warhaftig, 96; Israeli Legislator, Rabbi Helped Jews Flee Nazis

Zorach Warhaftig, 96, a rabbi and lawyer who helped nearly 5,000 Jews escape the Holocaust and later became an Israeli legislator, died Sept. 26 in Jerusalem of causes associated with aging.

Born in Volkovysk, Byelorussia, in 1906, he studied religion and was ordained a rabbi, and then earned a law degree from Warsaw University.

Fleeing Warsaw as the Germans surrounded the city at the outbreak of World War II, he moved to Kaunas in the independent state of Lithuania.

There, he headed the Palestine Committee for Polish Refugees and persuaded the Dutch consul to issue about 1,400 visas for Jews to move to the Dutch Caribbean island of Curacao.

After the Soviet Union annexed Lithuania and closed that consulate, Warhaftig persuaded Japanese Consul-General Chiune Sugihara to issue an additional 3,500 visas for Polish Jews to travel through the Soviet Union and Japan and on to Curacao, Palestine or the United States. To do so, Sugihara defied his own government, a military ally of Germany since 1936.

By 1942, Warhaftig had moved to New York, where he was elected to the executive board of the World Jewish Congress and continued persuading Jews to move to Palestine.

In 1947, Warhaftig settled in Palestine, where he served in the provisional Israeli Parliament and, in 1948, became one of 37 people to sign Israel’s Declaration of Independence.

He served in the Israeli Parliament from 1949 to 1981, and in 1956 helped create the National Religious Party.

He was also deputy minister of religious affairs from 1952 to 1962 and then minister of religious affairs until 1974.