Yehuda Blum was born on 2 October 1931 in Bratislava (today in Slovakia, then Czechoslovakia). He attended school there and joined a Zionist youth organisation in 1938. In 1939, after Slovakia became a fascist country allied with Nazi Germany, with Bratislava as its capital, Yehuda Blum fled to Budapest with his parents and two younger siblings. However, after Hungary was occupied by Germany in March 1944, the situation for Jews became more and more threatening.
In late June 1944, the Blum family managed to get places on the so-called Kasztner transport. After a journey of several days, this transport arrived at the Bergen-Belsen exchange camp (Hungarians’ Camp). In December 1944, the family was taken to Switzerland and released. Yehuda Blum spent several months in a Jewish children’s home there. In September 1945 he managed to emigrate to Palestine.
After leaving school and training as a teacher, Blum studied law at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Following his military service, he went to London to earn a PhD. Between 1961 and 1965, he worked for the Israeli Foreign Ministry as a lawyer. In 1966, he married Moriah Rabinovitz-Teomim. The couple has three children. From 1978 to 1984, Yehuda Blum was Israel’s ambassador to the UN in New York. After returning to Israel, he taught law at the Hebrew University. In addition, he was a visiting professor at various universities outside Israel and published extensively on international law.
We conducted two audio-visual interviews with Yehuda Blum. In these, he reported not only on his path of persecution and his biography, but also in particular on the various legal and moral aspects of the so-called Kastner transport in which he and his family found themselves. As a professor of international law and former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, he had a particularly knowledgeable view of the historical and political events.
Our condolences go out to his relatives.