Funeral services are scheduled for Thursday in Budapest, Hungary, for Rabbi Alexander Scheiber, director of the Rabbinic Seminary in Budapest, who died there today after a lengthy illness, it was reported by Rabbi Arthur Schneier, president of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation. Scheiber was 71 years old.
Scheiber was head of the only rabbinic seminary in Eastern Europe, and was responsible for training not only rabbis in Hungary, but Jews from the Soviet Union and elsewhere in the Eastern bloc.
Born in Budapest in 1913, Scheiber studied at the University of Budapest and was ordained from the Seminary in Budapest in 1938. He was Chief Rabbi of Dunafoldvar, in Hungary from 1940 to 1944. He was a professor at the Seminary after his appointment there in 1945 and became its director in 1950.
Considered a premier Oriental scholar, he conducted extensive research in the Genizah of the Kaufmann collection, and has been widely published. His other areas of specialties include Hungarian Jewish art and history.
The head of the central synagogue in Moscow, Adolf Shayevich, and the Chief Rabbi in Riga, Menachem Nidel, are but two of the many graduates of the Rabbinic Seminary in Budapest. Schneier, who is also spiritual leader of the Park East Synagogue, aided in gaining approval of the governments in Hungary and the Soviet Union to allow Soviet Jews to study under Scheiber.
“The Hungarian Jewish community has lost its greatest intellectual scholar whose research in Judaica extended to the libraries of Leningrad, New York and Cambridge, and who devoted his life to the preservation of Jewish scholarship in Hungary and the continuity of the remnant of Hungarian Jewry,” said Schneier.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
