Born in the eastern borderlands of Poland, in the early thirties he performed at revi-teater in Kovne (Kaunas, now in Lithuania) under the direction of Jonas Turkow.
In the late 1930s he appeared in several important Jewish sound films, including Joseph Green's Di freylekhe kabtsonim (1937) with Shimon Dzigan and Israel Shumacher (directed by Zygmunt Turkow, screenwriter Moishe Broderzon, music by Henech Kon) and Mamele (1938) with Molly Picon.
He left for the United States to do the filming; at the completion of the movie, World War II had begun and Oppenheim was unable to return to Poland.
He survived the Holocaust in the USSR-occupied part of eastern Poland, but his entire family died during the Nazi occupation.
[4] He died on 23 October 1973 and was buried in the Mount Hebron Cemetery in Queens, New York, on land owned by the Jewish theatrical union.