Kahane, David

David Kahane ( Hebrew דוד כהנא ; March 15, 1903, Grimailov, Galicia , Austria-Hungary - September 24, 1998 , Jerusalem , Israel ) - rabbi , religious leader, lieutenant colonel of the Polish Army .

Born March 15, 1903 in Grimailovo, near Ternopol, Austria-Hungary (now the territory of Ukraine), in a Jewish family.

In 1929 he graduated from the University of Vienna and in Beit Midrash (Jewish Theological Seminary) for rabbis. He returned to Lviv. He was a leader of the Zionist party of Mizrahi and the rabbi of the Sikstu synagogue in the city ​​of Lviv , was engaged in pedagogical activities, taught religion and the foundations of Judaism.

In 1929, he was appointed rabbi of the Sikstu synagogue in Lviv at 6 Shainohi St. (now Bankovskaya St.), and remained in this position until the Soviet Union occupied Lviv in 1939.

During the Second World War he was kept in the Lviv ghetto , and from 1942 - in the Yanovsky concentration camp, from where he fled in March 1943 . Rabbi Kahane himself, as well as his wife and young daughter, were rescued by representatives of the Greek Catholic (Uniate) clergy of Lviv, including Metropolitan Andrey Sheptitsky and his brother, Father Superior Clement . Rabbi Kahane himself took refuge in a student monastery, where he got the opportunity to work in the library. Forwarded to Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky Jewish books and religious relics, which were thus saved from destruction.

After World War II, he served in the Hadashim synagogue in Lviv, participated in the revival of the Jewish community of Poland , and after repatriation from the USSR, he served as chief rabbi of the Polish Army, first with the rank of major, and from 1946 - lieutenant colonel. In 1950 he moved to Israel , where he was the chief rabbi of the Israeli Air Force . Then he was the chief rabbi of the Jewish community of Argentina . The author of a book about the fate of the Lviv ghetto.