Eliyahu Koren (Hebrew: אליהו קורן; 23 July 1907 – 17 February 2001) was a German-born[1] Israeli[2] typographer and graphic artist.
"I saw by this verdict divestiture of the freedom of the Jewish individual, and decided to leave Germany at the earliest possible hour,"[3] he would later recall.
Korngold and a group of friends left Bavaria on April 1, 1933, and arrived in Haifa, Mandatory Palestine on May 15 of that year.
For six months, Korngold worked for one of the few graphic designers in Palestine at the time, Rudi Deutsch (Dayan), in Tel Aviv.
Rather than create a wholly new edition of the Bible, in 1953 Hebrew University Press published a photographic offset of Christian David Ginsburg's British and Foreign Bible Society edition to which hundreds of corrections had been made by Umberto Cassuto on the basis of the Aleppo Codex and other very old manuscripts, producing a text of unprecedented accuracy.
Korngold worked painstakingly on the project, correcting typesetting errors of previous editions, and creating a new font, Koren Bible Type to enable the text to be as accurate and legible as possible.
The text, vocalization, and cantillation were based on a Bible edition of the early 19th century German Jewish grammarian and masoretic scholar Wolf Heidenheim.
The Chief Rabbinate of Israel accepted the edition for reading Haftarah (prophetic portions) in synagogues when the handwritten parchment scroll is not used.
For example, Moshe Goshen-Gottstein said: "Since he was aware of his lack in masoretic expertise, he sought the help of three scholars, all of who suffered from the same lack of masoretic expertise ... while the publisher made persistent claims that this was the first edition set and printed in their old/new homeland, this was, in fact ... hardly an edition like that of Dotan, but another rehash of the material prepared by ben Hayim.