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Meir Bar-Ilan (; – ) was an Orthodox Judaism rabbi, author, and religious Zionist activist, who served as leader of the Mizrachi movement in the United States and Mandatory Palestine. Bar-Ilan University, founded in 1955, was named in his honour.
He studied at the Volozhin Yeshiva and, after his father's death in 1894, at the traditional yeshivas of Telz Yeshiva, Brisk yeshivas and Novardok yeshiva, where he learned with his maternal grandfather, Rabbi Yechiel Michel Epstein. After gaining semicha in 1902 at the age of twenty-two, Bar-Ilan travelled to Germany to attend the University of Berlin. There, he became acquainted with a more modern form of Orthodox Judaism that had a more tolerant attitude to secular education and to political Zionism (although such attitudes were also present in the Lithuania of his youth). Bar-Ilan was deeply influenced by the local religious community and its philosophy of Torah im Derech Eretz.
In 1911, he founded the Hebrew language weekly newspaper Ha’Ivri in Berlin as a "non-party paper dedicated to all the affairs of Israel, faithful in its spirit to our religious tradition and to our national renaissance." That same year, Bar-Ilan was appointed secretary of the world Mizrachi movement. In 1913 he came to the United States and developed local Mizrachi groups into a national organisation, chairing the first American Mizrachi convention, held in Cincinnati in May 1914.
Bar-Ilan settled in New York in 1914, becoming president of the American Mizrachi movement the following year, a position he held until 1928. In his absence Ha’Ivri ceased publication in April 1914, but was re-established under Bar-Ilan's direction in New York in January 1916. Published until 1921, the paper's contributors included such prominent writers as S. Y. Agnon, Joseph Opatoshu, Reuben Brainin, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, and Yehuda Leib Maimon. Bar-Ilan was also an active member of the Joint Distribution Committee during World War I, and served as vice president of the Central Relief Committee of New York City in 1916. He founded the Mizrachi Teachers Institute in 1917. From 1920 through 1922, Bar-Ilan briefly served as acting president for what is now Yeshiva University during the temporary absence of its then-president, Bernard Revel.
He was a vocal opponent of the 1937 British Peel Commission and the 1939 British White Paper, and advocated civil disobedience and non-cooperation by the with the British.
At the beginning of 1943, Bar-Ilan visited the United States to lobby the American government to rescue Holocaust and help establish a Jewish state. He secured meetings with leading politicians and foreign ambassadors, including Vice President Henry Wallace, Senator Robert Wagner, Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley, and House Minority Leader Joseph Martin.
After 1948, his activities were scholastically oriented. He organized a committee of scholars to examine the legal problems of the new state in the light of Jewish law and founded an institute for the publication of a new complete edition of the Talmud.
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