Sándor Scheiber

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

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.

This institution retained its international fame throughout the Communist era, when it was the only place in the Eastern bloc where rabbis would be graduated for serving in Hungary and abroad.

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).

[1] Each year, the Sándor Scheiber Prize is awarded by the Hungarian Ministry of Culture on 3 March, the anniversary of his death.