Baruch Korff

Baruch Korff was born in 1914 in Ukraine

Baruch Korff was born on July 4, 1914, in Novohrad-Volynskyi, then part of the Russian Empire and now in Ukraine. He came from a long line of rabbis. In a 1919 pogrom his mother was killed in front of him, and he later joined his father in Poland, where he studied in yeshivas.

In 1926 he moved to the United States and studied at several yeshivas, including Yeshiva Rabbi Isaac Elchanan. He was ordained a rabbi in 1934. He headed a yeshiva in Brooklyn and later led a congregation.

In Poland he met Zeev Jabotinsky and joined the Revisionist Zionist movement. During World War II he directed the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe. In 1947 he was arrested in Paris over a Lehi plot to bomb the Foreign Office in London, but all charges were later dropped.

From 1950 he served as rabbi of Temple Israel in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and from 1954 to 1971 as a rabbi in Taunton, Massachusetts. He met Richard Nixon in 1967 and became his supporter and confidant. After the Watergate scandal he became known for defending Nixon, and he later worked as a consultant at Brown University. He died on July 26, 1995.