Sándor Scheiber (also Alexander Scheiber; 9 July 1913 – 3 March 1985) was a Hungarian rabbi and an eminent Jewish scholar. From 1950 until his death he was director of the Rabbinical Seminary in

Budapest Budapest is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns of Hungary, most populous city of Hungary. It is the List of cities in the European Union by population within city limits, tenth-largest city in the European Union by popul ...

Biography

Scheiber was born in Budapest into a rabbinical family on both his maternal and paternal sides. He was

ordained Ordination is the process by which individuals are Consecration in Christianity, consecrated, that is, set apart and elevated from the laity class to the clergy, who are thus then authorized (usually by the religious denomination, denominationa ...

at the Seminary in 1938 as a student of Bernát Heller. After studies in London, Oxford and Cambridge, where he discovered many genizah fragments while analyzing medieval Hebrew manuscripts, he served as rabbi in Dunaföldvár from 1941 to 1944. In 1945, he became a professor at the rabbinical seminary and was its director from 1950 until his death. This institution retained its international fame throughout the Communist era, when it was the only place in the

Eastern bloc The Eastern Bloc, also known as the Communist Bloc (Combloc), the Socialist Bloc, the Workers Bloc, and the Soviet Bloc, was an unofficial coalition of communist states of Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America that were a ...

where rabbis would be graduated for serving in Hungary and abroad. Furthermore, Scheiber joined the faculty of the

University of Szeged The University of Szeged () is a Public university, public research university in Szeged, Hungary. Established as the Jesuit Academy of Kolozsvár in present-day Cluj-Napoca in 1581, the institution was re-established as a university in 1872 by ...

in 1949, teaching oriental folklore. He considered it his mission to explore the Hungarian Jewish past and perpetuate its memory, as well as to publish the contributions of great Hungarian-Jewish scholars, including the works of Wilhelm Bacher, ''Fauna und Mineralien der Juden'' by Immanuel Löw (1969) and the diary (''Tagebuch'') of Ignác Goldziher (1978). In 1957, he published a facsimile of the so-called ''Kaufmann Haggadah'', called after David Kaufmann, MS 422 of the Kaufmann Collection in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He died on 3 March 1985, in Budapest. Each year, the Sándor Scheiber Prize is awarded by the Hungarian Ministry of Culture on 3 March, the anniversary of his death. Among the laureates is the biochemist Máté Hidvégi.

References

External links

Picture and biography (Hungarian)

Róbert Dán: Occident and Orient: a tribute to the memory of Alexander Scheiber
{{DEFAULTSORT:Scheiber, Sandor Rabbis from Budapest Jewish Hungarian history 1913 births 1985 deaths