Michael Dov Weissmandl (Yiddish: מיכאל בער ווייסמאנדל) [a] (25 October 1903 – 29 November 1957) was an Orthodox rabbi of the Oberlander Jews of present-day western Slovakia.

[3] Michael Ber was born in Debrecen, Hungary on 25 October 1903 (4 Cheshvan 5664 on the Hebrew calendar) to Yosef Weissmandl, a shochet.

It is related that he was treated with great respect by the Chief Librarian of the Bodleian after an episode when he correctly identified the author of a manuscript that had been misattributed by the library's scholars.

The group's main activity was to help and save Jews as much as possible, in part through payment of bribes and ransom to German and Slovak officials.

[page needed] The transportation of Slovak Jews was in fact halted for two years after they arranged a $50,000 (in 1952 dollars) ransom deal with the Nazi SS official Dieter Wisliceny.

The events in Switzerland and possibly other considerations led to threats of retribution against Hungary's Regent Miklós Horthy by President Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and others.

This was one of the main factors which forced Horthy to order on 7 July, 1944 stopping the death camp transports by Hungary, which until then took about 12,000 Hungarian Jews a day to Auschwitz.

[12] There he found shelter in a bunker in a storage room of a private house, along with 17 other Jews who included the Rebbe of Stropkov Menachem Mendel Halberstam.

[12] Rezső Kasztner visited the bunker several times, once, to the consternation of the inhabitants, in the company of SS officer Max Grüson.

[12] In April 1945, Kasztner visited again, this time in the company of another SS officer who took the party to Switzerland in a truck with an escort of German soldiers.

With the help of Rabbi Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz, Weissmandl bought the Brewster estate in Mount Kisco, in Westchester County, New York and moved his Yeshiva there in 1949.

For example, it does not mention the last two transports from Slovakia in October 1942, which contradict Weissmandl's belief that the Working Group's bribes were responsible for the cessation of deportation.