Salomon Wininger

Salomon Wininger

Salomon Wininger (13 December 1877, Gura Humorului, Bukovina – December 1968, in Ramat Gan, Israel) was an Austrian-Jewish biographer.

Before World War I, Wininger lived in Chernivtsi and moved to Vienna during the war years, where he decided to write biographies of famous Jews. This idea was pushed in order to counter the self-hating mood of Jewish youth in the city, created under the influence of Otto Weininger's works.

After his return to Chernivtsi in 1921, Shlomo Wininger wrote about 13,000 biographies and published them in seven volumes between 1925 and 1936. He survived the time of World War II in Chernivtsi and emigrated in 1951 to Israel.

Wininger is considered as one of the greatest Jewish biographers of all time.^[1]

Works

Frontpage, Vol. 1

• Große Jüdische National-Biographie ("Lexicon of Jewish National Biographies"). Chernivtsi 1925–1936.
• Gura Humora: Geschichte einer Kleinstadt in der Südbukovina ("Gura Humora: History of a Small Town in South Bukovina").

References

• Encyclopaedia Judaica. Vol. 16. Keter, Jerusalem 1971.
• Handbuch österreichischer Autorinnen und Autoren jüdischer Herkunft 18. bis 20. Jahrhundert. Vol. 3, S-Z. Ed.: Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Wien. K. G. Saur, München 2002, ISBN 3-598-11545-8, p. 1483.

1. See, for instance: David Lazar, "Biografia shel – biograf" [=A Biography of – a Biographer], Maariv, 22 April 1960; Raphael Bashan, "Biografia atzuva shel gedol ha'biografim be'dorenu" [=A sad biography of the greatest biographer of our generation], Maariv, 5 October 1960.