Dov Lior

Dov Lior (דוב ליאור, born 30 October 1933) is an Israeli Orthodox rabbi.

In 1944, he was placed in an orphanage for Polish citizens.

In 1945, he arrived in Poland.

Using a false identity, he managed to pass into the American occupation zone in Germany, where Jewish institutions operated.

There, he reunited with an older brother who had served in the Red Army during the war, while another brother who was with him during the war joined the Hashomer Hatzair movement.

Lior was placed in a Jewish children's home, where he began to study Hebrew.

In 1947, Lior was one of the passengers on the SS Exodus, which was intercepted by the Royal Navy after defying the British blockade of Palestine.

He and the other refugees were deported by the British back to Germany.

He eventually managed to reach Mandatory Palestine aboard the ship Negba, which arrived a few weeks before the establishment of the State of Israel.

Once there, he changed his surname to the Hebrew Lior.

In Israel, he first studied at the Bnei Akiva Kfar HaRoeh high school yeshiva, and then at Zvi Yehuda Kook's Mercaz haRav yeshiva, where, owing to Lior's being an orphan, Kook treated him like a son.

Lior married Bitya Goldberger in 1960.

He served in the Israel Defense Forces for one month in 1964.

In 1978, he ran for the post of Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, but was defeated 37-25 by Bezalel Zolty.

He served as Av Beit Din of the Beersheva Rabbinical Court.

One of his rulings, that Jews should be prepared to sacrifice their lives to defend the settlement of Hebron, has been interpreted as support for acts of suicide if the government tries to force evacuation.

In the late 1980s, Israel's Attorney General barred Lior's almost certain election to the Supreme Rabbinical Council of Israel following a public outcry over his remark that captured Arab terrorists could be used as guinea pigs in medical experiments.

After the Mercaz HaRav massacre, he said it was forbidden by halakha (Jewish law) to employ or rent homes to Arabs.

She died of cancer in 1988.

He later married Esther, widow of Ephraim Shahor.

Lior has 11 children, 55 grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.

His two brothers arrived in Israel after him, and joined the Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz HaMa'apil.

Lior is a Religious Zionist leader.

He served as Rabbi of Moshav Kfar Haroeh for 10 years.

He subsequently became Chief Rabbi of Kiryat Arba.

He serves along with Eliezer Waldman as head of the Hesder Yeshiva Nir Kiryat Arba.

In 2008, Lior and other right-wing rabbis declared the government's policies on Israeli settlements to be "worse than the British Mandate's White Paper".

Evaluating the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Lior said it proved Israel was the one Middle Eastern state with sufficient military force to be considered a real power, a state all nations, bar none, must reckon with, and that "rooting out the iniquity" (of the terrorists) was "but a preliminary to the eventual rooting out of all evil in the world".

According to Professor Uriel Simon, Lior is also reported to have said at a rally that, "(i)n order to prevent the death of one (Israeli) soldier, I am willing to destroy all of Beirut".

In 2009, he denounced the possible transfer of jurisdiction of Christian sites in Israel to the Holy See, saying it was "unthinkable to hand over to the Vatican any piece of our Holy Land".

In 2011, he suggested that the Israeli government should offer incentives to the Bedouin to return to what he considered as their places of origin, Saudi Arabia and Libya.

He served as the Chief Rabbi of Hebron and Kiryat Arba in the southern West Bank until late 2014.

He is the rosh yeshiva of the Kiryat Arba Hesder Yeshiva and heads the "Council of Rabbis of Judea and Samaria".

Dubbed an extremist by the The Forward, Lior on multiple occasions has called for ethnic cleansing of Arab Muslims and has expressed support for mass murderers.

Dov Leinwand (later Lior) was born to a Belz Hasidic family, son to Moshe Leinwand, in Jarosław, western Galicia, Poland.

During World War II, he fled the Nazis with his family to the Soviet Union.

They went deep into Soviet territory, including Siberia and Kazakhstan, and suffered from hunger and disease.

Both of his parents died.

In late 2014, Lior stepped down as chief rabbi.

In February 2015, he moved from Kiryat Arba to the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.