Yohanan Bader

Yohanan Bader was born in 1901 in Kraków

Bader was born as Jan Bader in Kraków, then part of Austria-Hungary, to Leopold and Eugenia Bader. As a youth he was active in the Bund and then in HaShomer Hatzair. In 1925 he joined the Revisionist Zionist movement.

He studied at a state gymnasium and then law at the Jagiellonian University, where he earned a Doctor of Law degree and became a lawyer. He edited the Polish weekly Trybuna Narodowa.

In 1939 he moved to Soviet-ruled eastern Poland and in 1940 was sentenced to hard labor in northern Russia. Released in 1941, he left the Soviet Union with the Polish army in 1942. He reached Palestine in December 1943, joined the Irgun, and was held by the British in Latrun from 1945 until May 1948.

He was a founder of the Herut movement in 1948 and the first editor of its newspaper. In the Knesset he focused on economics, debated budgets with finance ministers including Levi Eshkol, and chaired the State Control Committee. With Avraham Ofer he initiated the Bader-Ofer law on distributing surplus votes, passed in 1973.

He retired before the 1977 elections and published his book The Knesset and Me in 1979. He died in Ramat Gan in 1994. Streets in Ramat Gan and Be'er Sheva bear his name.