Isaac Kahan

Isaac Kahan was born in 1913 in Brody

Yitzhak Kahan was born on November 15, 1913, in Brody, Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary. He came from the Kahana Heller family of rabbis, and his brother was Rabbi Kalman Kahana, a Knesset member and signer of the Declaration of Independence.

He studied law, administration and economics at the University of Lviv. He moved to the Land of Israel in 1935. In 1938 he was secretary of a committee formed after a market bombing in Haifa, then passed the Mandate exam for foreign lawyers and worked in the law office of Shimon Agranat.

During the War of Independence he volunteered for the military legal service and served about a year as a military defense lawyer. In 1950 he became a magistrate judge in Haifa, and in 1953 a district judge there. His son Eliezer, an armored corps soldier, was killed in Sinai in 1969 during the War of Attrition.

He was appointed to the Supreme Court on October 7, 1970. He chaired a committee on privacy in 1974 and a committee on the polygraph in 1978. He became President of the Supreme Court on April 30, 1982.

In 1982 he headed the commission that investigated the events at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut. Its findings, published in February 1983, recommended that Defense Minister Ariel Sharon end his term. He retired on November 15, 1983, was succeeded by Meir Shamgar, and died on April 24, 1985.