Yehuda Blum

Background

Yehuda Z. Blum was born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, in 1931 and observed his bar-mitzvah in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Education

Yehuda Blum studied at Hebrew University at the Faculty of Law and received Magister Juris.

Blum earned his law degree from the University of London. His doctoral thesis, in 1961, was on Historic titles in international law.

Career

Blum immigrated to British Mandate for Palestine in 1945. He joined the faculty of Hebrew University in 1965 and until retiring in 2001 occupied the Hersch Lauterpacht Chair in International Law there.

In 1968, Blum worked for the United Nations Office of Legal Counsel. In 1968 he served as a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Fellow at the University of Sydney in Australia.

In 1976 he was part of the Israeli delegation to the 31st session of United Nations General Assembly. He served as Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations for six years, from 1978 to 1984. As the Ambassador to the United Nations, Blum was often critical of it, saying that the United Nations "fans the flames of the Middle East conflict." The New York Times quoted him as saying that "The essence of the Middle East conflict has always been and remains the persistent enmity of Arab states towards the Jewish national renaissance." As United Nations envoy, he made headlines for "scolding" a group of 133 American Jewish law students protesting Israel"s invasion of Lebanon and protesting Jewish settlements in West Bank and Gaza. He questioned the factual, as well as the moral position, of the students" view, saying that they "have not given the slightest indication of their willingness to bear any personal consequences of their patronizing and fortuitous advice.".

In 1978–1984, Blum served as Israel Ambassador to the United Nations.

He has served as a senior research scholar at the University of Michigan, and visiting professor in the law schools of the University of Texas, New York University, Tulane University, the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, and others

He has written several books and published many scholarly articles on international legal problems in law journals in English, Hebrew and German. He is currently the law editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Historic Titles in International Law

    (The question of Historic Titles in International Law has ...)

  • Secure boundaries and Middle East peace in the light of international law and practice
  • Historic Titles in International Law Paperback January 1, 1965
  • Secure Boundaries and Middle East Peace.

Membership

He was a member of Israeli delegation to 3rd United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea in 1973. He was a member of the Israeli negotiating team that drafted the peace treaty with Egypt (Camp David Accords) in 1978, the Blair House negotiations in March 1979 and the Israeli legal team at the Taba arbitration talks between Israel and Egypt between 1986 and 1988.

• Member of International Law Association American Society of International Law , United States

Connections

He was married to Moriah Rabinovitz-Teomim in 1966. He has 3 children: Ariel David, Efrat, Binyamin Avi-adjunct.

Wife:

Moriah Rabinovitz-Teomim

Son:

Ariel David

Son:

Binyamin Avi-ad

Daughter:

Efrat Heftzibah