Dov Lior

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Dov Lior (Hebrew: דב ליאור‎, born 1933) is the Chief Rabbi of Hebron and Kiryat Arba in the southern West Bank. He is also the Head of a Yeshiva in Kiryat Arba,[1] and also heads the "Council of Rabbis of Judea and Samaria".

He was born to a Belz hasidic family, son to Moshe Leibland in Breslau, Galicia. He attempted to board the Exodus, eventually arriving on the Negba a few weeks before the establishment of the State of Israel, where 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 Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook's Mercaz haRav yeshiva, where owing to Lior's being an orphan, the Rabbi treated him like a son. Lior was married in 5720 to Bitya, but his wife died of cancer in 5748; he remarried in 5736 to Esther, widow of Rabbi Ephraim Shahor. Lior has 11 children, 55 grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. Two of his brothers arrived in Israel after him and joined the Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz HaMaf'il.

Lior is considered by many to be a leading scholar of the Religious Zionist camp and the prime student of the late Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, son of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook. In the late 1980s the Attorney General barred Lior’s election to the Supreme Rabbinical Council following a public outcry over statements he made suggesting that captured Arab terrorists could be used to conduct medical experiments. ^[1] He has, with other rabbis, issued a precedent setting halakhic ruling that Israel must shoot civilian populations in areas from whence attacks on Jewish communities originate, and another ruling which states that it is forbidden by Jewish law to employ or rent homes to Arabs.^[2]

On March 19, 2007, Dov Lior, arrived at Beit HaShalom and gave his blessings to the structure and local Jewish community.[2] On January 21, 2008, Rabbi Dov Lior, Rabbi Ya'acov Shapira of Jerusalem's Mercaz haRav Yeshiva, Rabbi Elyakim Levanon of Elon Moreh, and Rabbi Nahum Rabinovitch of Ma'aleh Adumim met at Beit HaShalom to declare the government's policies on Israeli settlements to be "worse than the British Mandate's White Paper."^[3] In March of 2008, in light of the Mercaz HaRav massacre he made a halakhic ruling that according to Jewish law, 'it is strictly prohibited to hire Arabs, or to rent houses on Israeli land to them. Their employment is out of the question, not only in the yeshivas but also in hotels or factories; basically anywhere'.^[4] ^[5]