Gabriel Bach


Gabriel Bach is an Israeli jurist, was a judge of the Supreme Court of Israel and was the deputy prosecutor in the prosecution of Adolf Eichmann.

Biography

Bach is the son of Victor Bach, who was the general manager of the Hirsch copper and brass factory, and his wife Erna Bach. He grew up in Berlin-Charlottenburg and attended Theodore Herzl School.
In October 1938 the Bach family emigrated from Nazi Germany to Amsterdam, where he continued to attend school. He is the only survivor of his Jewish classmates from this school. In 1940, a month before the invasion of the Netherlands by the German army, the family booked a passage to British Mandate Palestine and settled in Jerusalem. He joined the Haganah in 1943 and attended high school at the Hebrew University Secondary School, graduating in 1945.
After a year of studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he received a scholarship to study law at University College London. After graduating with honors in 1949, he interned in a law office before returning to Israel, where he did military service in the Israel Defense Forces in the Military Advocate General's Corps from 1951 to 1953, and was discharged from active service with the rank of Captain. In his military reserve duty he served as a judge on the Military Court of Appeals, reaching the rank of Colonel.
In 1953 Bach began working in the State Attorney's Office. In 1961 he was appointed as Deputy Attorney General and as the second of the three prosecutors in the Eichmann trial.
In 1969, he was appointed State Attorney. In 1982 he was appointed as a judge of the Supreme Court of Israel and retired in 1997. In 1984 he served as the precedent-breaking Chairman of the Central Elections Committee. He was subsequently appointed as the chairman of several senior government committees and fact finding commissions.
He subsequently represented Israel at international conferences.
He married Ruth Arazi, the daughter of Yehuda Arazi, in 1955. The couple lives in Jerusalem.

Awards