Jacob Robinson

Jacob Robinson was born in 1889 in Seirijai

Jacob Robinson was born on November 26, 1889, in Seirijai, a small town in Lithuania under Russian rule. He was the eldest of the 7 children of David and Bluma Robinson, a family of Torah scholars. His father was a teacher who spoke for his community before the authorities.

He received a traditional Jewish education from a private teacher and finished high school in Suwałki in 1910. In 1914 he graduated from the law faculty of the University of Warsaw with a doctorate in law. That year he was drafted into the Russian army, was taken prisoner by the Germans a year later, and spent the rest of the war in 8 prison camps.

After the war he founded the Hebrew high school in Virbalis and ran it from 1919 to 1922. In 1923 he was elected to the Lithuanian Seimas, where he led the Jewish faction and the minorities bloc until 1926. He co-edited the Zionist Yiddish daily Di Yidishe Shtime and worked for Jewish autonomy and against discrimination of Jews.

From 1927 he practiced law in Kaunas with his brother Nehemiah, and he served as a legal adviser to the Lithuanian foreign ministry. At the end of 1940 he moved to the United States, headed the Institute of Jewish Affairs and taught international law at Columbia University. He advised the American prosecutor at Nuremberg in 1945 and the Israeli prosecutor in the Eichmann trial in 1961, and was among the directors of Yad Vashem. He died on October 24, 1977, in New York.