Shlomo Zev Zweigenhaft (Hebrew: הרב שלמה זאב צווייגענהאפט‎) was a rabbi who was Rosh Hashochtim of Poland (overseeing the country's kosher slaughterers) before the Holocaust.

At the age of 14 he had memorized the gemara of the entire massekhtot of zevachim and menachot with the commentaries of Rashi and Tosafot[3] He then returned to Sosnowiec where he was a student of David Moshe Rabinowicz in Kibbutz Govoha Yeshiva.

As a young boy Zweigenhaft had been privy to his family's masorah (transmission of Jewish religious tradition) of shechita stretching back hundreds of years.

When Zweigenhaft was 14 years old and still studying in Amstov, the shochtim of the city encountered a halachic difficulty and summoned Dov Berish Einhorn for assistance.

[3] By the time he was 20, he was the shochet of several cities in Poland, including Radomsk, Polavno, Amstov, Volbrum, Elkish and Tchebin, and was the Rosh Hashochtim of Sosnowiec.

Despite being the youngest member of the Vaad, Zweigenhaft was selected to perform Shechita in front of the assembled legislators and demonstrate that shechitah was a quick humane form of animal slaughter.

Zweigenhaft retreiced a chalef (shechitah knife) from a museum in Hamburg and on August 21, 1945, he performed the first known kosher slaughter in Germany since it was outlawed by the Nazis in 1933.

[1] On November 7, 1945, the British Chief Rabbi's Religious Emergency Council established two large kitchens in Celle to provide kosher food for the thousands of Jewish survivors living in the nearby Bergen-Belsen D.P.

[10] In 1952 Zweigenhaft emigrated to America and was asked by Eliezer Silver to be the Rosh Hashochtim of the two kosher slaughterhouses in Cincinnati, Ohio.

[12] In 1953 Zweigenhaft moved to New York where he was shocked by what he considered to be low kosher standards of shechita and began to advocate for improvements.

His expertise was highly sought after and he was asked to travel internationally to lecture on shechita, inspect kosher slaughterhouses, and recommend improvements.

[10] After surviving the Holocaust Zweigenhaft married Frieda, who at the time was a teacher of Judaic studies at the religious girls seminary (kibbutz) in Bergen-Belsen.

Later, in the United States, she volunteered regularly at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital and she was one of the founders of "Rivkah Laufer Bikur Cholim", a board member of "N’shei Agudas Yisroel" chapter in Crown Heights and the vice president of "Rabbi Meir Baal Hanes Kupath Polin" Ladies Auxiliary of Brooklyn.