Menahem Hayyim Schmelzer (Hebrew: מנחם חיים שמלצר; April 1934 – 10 December 2022) was a Hungarian-American Jewish librarian and writer.
He and his family survived the Holocaust when their train, which was bound for Auschwitz, was diverted to the Strasshof labor camp near Vienna, as part of the Kastner deal.
He left Hungary after the Communist uprising in 1956 and moved to Switzerland where he studied Bible and Arabic at Basel University, concurrently serving as librarian of the Jewish community.
[6] The books and offices were moved into a temporary structure for seventeen years, while a new library was designed, constructed, and put into operation under Schmelzer’s supervision.
He was awarded a doctorate of Hebrew Letters from JTS in 1965 for his dissertation on the poetry of Isaac Ibn Ghiyath, which he wrote under the supervision of Professor Shalom Spiegel.
[7] In addition to writing numerous articles and reviews for scholarly journals, Schmelzer was associate division editor of the “Modern Jewish Scholarship” section of Encyclopaedia Judaica.