| Yohanan Bader | |
|---|---|
| Date of birth | 19 August 1901 |
| Place of birth | Kraków, Austria-Hungary |
| Year of aliyah | 1943 |
| Date of death | 16 June 1994 (aged 92) |
| Knessets | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 |
| Party | Likud (1974-1977) |
| Former parties | Herut (1949-1965) Gahal (1965-1974) |
Yohanan Bader (Hebrew: יוחנן בדר, 19 August 1901 – 16 June 1994) was a Revisionist Zionist leader and Israeli politician.
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Bader was born in Kraków in Austria-Hungary (today in Poland), where he studied at a State Gymnasium. In his youth he was active in the Jewish Socialist Party, the "Bund" followed by "HaShomer Hatzair" but in 1925 he joined the Revisionist Zionist Movement. He studied law, economics, philosophy and history at Jagiellonian University, where he earned Doctor of Law degree and was certified as a lawyer.[1] He also edited the Polish language weekly Tribuna Narodna.
In September 1939 he moved to East Poland, then under Soviet rule, and was arrested and sentenced to hard labor in northern Russia in 1940. In 1941 he was released under the terms of the Soviet-Polish Agreement and left the Soviet Union, and in August 1942 he joined the Free Polish Army. In December 1943 he arrived in Palestine and joined the Irgun, and in 1945 he was arrested by the British Authorities and was imprisoned in the Latrun Camp until May 1948. He was one of the founders and ideologists of the Herut Movement in 1948 and editor of the newspaper Herut.[2]
He was member of the Knesset for Herut, and its successors, Gahal and Likud, from 1949 to 1977, a regular member of the Finance Committee, and was the economic spokesman of his movement; he is remembered for his rhetoric debates with former Minister of Finance Levi Eshkol. He was also chairman of the Committee on State Control. He is famous for the amendment to the election law, which became valid since the elections to the eighth Knesset, according to which the excess votes are distributed to the lists with the largest number of voters per seat - a method known in the world as the D'Hondt method, and is known in Israel as the Bader-Ofer method - named after Bader (Gahal) and co-proposer Avraham Ofer (Alignment).[3]
He retired before the 1977 elections (which Likud won) and so could not fulfill his wish to become Finance Minister under Menachem Begin. He died in 1994.