Yohanan Bader

Yohanan Bader
File:Yochanan Bader.jpeg
Date of birth	19 August 1901
Place of birth	Kraków, Austria-Hungary
Year of aliyah	1943
Date of death
Knessets	1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Faction represented in Knesset
1949-1965	Herut
1965–1974	Gahal
1974–1977	Likud

Yohanan Bader (Hebrew: יוחנן בדר‎, 19 August 1901 – 16 June 1994) was a Revisionist Zionist leader and Israeli politician.

Biography

Yochanan Bader was born in Kraków in Austria-Hungary (today Poland), where he studied at a State Gymnasium. In his youth he was active in the Jewish Socialist Party, the "Bund" followed by "HaShomer Hatzair" but in 1925 he joined the Revisionist Zionist Movement. He studied law, economics, philosophy and history at Jagiellonian University, where he earned his Doctor of Law degree and was certified as a lawyer. He also edited the Polish language weekly Trybuna Narodowa.

In September 1939, Bader moved to East Poland, then under Soviet rule, and was arrested and sentenced to hard labor in northern Russia in 1940. In 1941 he was released under the terms of the Soviet-Polish Agreement and left the Soviet Union, and in August 1942 he joined the Free Polish Army. In December 1943 he immigrated to Palestine and joined the Irgun. In 1945 he was arrested by the British authorities and imprisoned in the Latrun Camp until May 1948.

Political career

He was one of the founders and ideologists of the Herut Movement in 1948 and editor of the newspaper Herut.

File:Grave of Yohanan Bader and his wife.JPG

Grave of Bader and his wife

He was member of the Knesset for Herut and its successors, Gahal and Likud, from 1949 to 1977, a regular member of the Finance Committee, and was the economic spokesman of his movement; he is remembered for his rhetoric debates with former Minister of Finance Levi Eshkol. He was also chairman of the Committee on State Control. He is famous for the amendment to the election law, which became valid since the elections to the Eighth Knesset, according to which the excess votes are distributed to the lists with the largest number of voters per seat - a method known in the world as the D'Hondt method, and is known in Israel as the Bader-Ofer method - named after Bader (Gahal) and co-proposer Avraham Ofer (Alignment).

Bader retired before the 1977 elections (which Likud won). He died in 1994.

Published works

• The Knesset and Me (1979) (Hebrew)

External links

• Yohanan Bader on the Knesset website