Yehuda Blum

Yehuda Blum was born in 1931 in Bratislava

Yehuda Zvi Blum was born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, on 2 October 1931, into a family of rabbis. During the Holocaust he and his family were saved by the Kastner train, which took them to Bergen-Belsen and then to Switzerland. He immigrated to the Land of Israel in 1945.

He was active in the Mizrachi youth movement and studied at a religious teachers' seminary in Jerusalem. He studied law at the Hebrew University through the academic reserve program and led the religious students' group Yavneh. He became a lawyer in 1959 and earned a doctorate in international law in London in 1961.

In 1962 he became assistant legal adviser at the Foreign Ministry. In 1965 he joined the law faculty of the Hebrew University, where he later held the Hersch Lauterpacht Chair in International Law until he retired in 2001. He wrote 4 books, including Secure Boundaries (1971), and taught as a visiting professor at several American universities.

He served on Israeli delegations to the UN and was on the legal team for the peace treaty with Egypt. As ambassador to the UN from 1978 to 1984, he represented Israel during Operation Litani, the bombing of the Iraqi reactor and the First Lebanon War. From 1986 to 1988 he was on the legal team in the Taba arbitration.

In 1966 he married Moriah Rabinovitch-Teomim, and they had 3 children. He died on 16 September 2025.