The death of Kenneth Bialkin, who slipped away Friday at 89, takes from us one of America’s wisest lawyers and Jewry’s greatest tribunes just when his counsel would have been at a premium, on both fronts. Our country and city are blessed with many leading lawyers, but it is hard to think of any who had more seichel — to use the Yiddish word that connotes a combination of intelligence, street sense, and wisdom — than Bialkin.

His death is a sad moment at The New York Sun. He served as our general counsel from the registration of the trademark in 2001 and creation of the limited liability company that would launch the new newspaper in 2002 to the raising of the capital that sustained the paper for its six and a half years in print. All of us think of him as a friend and a member of the Sun family.

We first met Bialkin one day in the 1980s at the Hotel King David in Jerusalem. Then with the Wall Street Journal, we were due to have breakfast with Ariel Sharon. In the hotel coffee shop, we discovered that Sharon was already deep in breakfast with Bialkin. So with Sharon we had a wonderful reunion, and a new friendship was formed, just as we were preparing to launch the Forward.

That turned out to be fortuitous, since Bialkin had held an astounding list of leadership positions within the Jewish community — chairman of, to name but a few, the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Historical Society, America-Israel Friendship League and, not long before our breakfast, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

Bialkin was an exemplar not only of constancy and integrity in his defense of the Jews but also of radicality. He kept in his office a dozen or more copies of Vladimir Jabotinsky’s last book, issued in 1940 in Britain under the title “The Jewish War Front.” It was a call for fielding a Jewish army on every Allied front and listing the establishment of a Jewish State in the land of Israel as one of the formal Allied war aims.

Yet Bialkin was also engaged in American politics. He was among the few who grasped early on that the more logical party for American Jews was the Republican. It’s not that he saw Israel as a partisan issue; support for the Jewish State, like his personal friendships, was broadly bipartisan. His accession to the GOP was a minority view that, with each passing season, starts to look prophetic.

At Park East Synagogue Monday in Manhattan, Bialkin was remembered by a congregation of loving friends and family, including his wife, Ann, daughters Lisa and Johanna, and grandsons. The prime minister of Israel sent a message. The founding managing editor of the Sun, Ira Stoll, has an affecting report in the Algemeiner. Few will be more fervently remembered than Kenneth Bialkin will be among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.

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Image: Detail of photograph from Skadden.com.