Jacob Avigdor

Jacob Avigdor was born into a rabbinic family in Tyrawa Wołoska, a shtetl in the Austrian province of Galicia between the cities of Sanok and Przemyśl (now southeast Poland) in 1896.

Acquiring a high reputation as an orator and Talmudist, he was named Chief Rabbi of Drohobych and Boryslav, then in southeast Poland (now western Ukraine) in 1920 (age 24), where he officiated until the Nazi occupation.

He officiated at the wedding of future Prime Minister of Israel Menachem Begin and Aliza Arnold in May of 1939 which took place at the Eden Hotel in Truskavets, Poland, which was a summer resort near Drohobych.

After his liberation from the Buchenwald concentration camp, Avigdor became extremely active in the efforts of rescue and rehabilitation of Jewish refugees in postwar Europe.

A prolific writer, his topics included religious philosophy, Jewish history and traditions, and commentary on Biblical text.

The Holocaust Museum at Yad Vashem holds a Hebrew calendar written by him from memory during his stay at Buchenwald (to view it, see below External Links).

He had seen the death of a man, and not long after the war, at a DP camp in Italy, he wrote a document for his widow as witness.

As she relocated to Germany and wanted to remarry, the senior Rabbi Jacob Avigdor, at the time head of the Jewish court in postwar Bergen-Belsen, needed proof that the woman's husband had died.