Carmilly-Weinberger, Moshe

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CARMILLY-WEINBERGER, MOSHE

CARMILLY-WEINBERGER, MOSHE (1907– ), historian and rabbi (chief rabbi of the Cluj Neolog community), and professor at the Yeshiva University of New York. Born into a religious family in Budapest, he studied in yeshivot and high schools in Transylvania and rabbinical seminaries in Budapest and Breslau, obtaining his Ph.D. from the Budapest University. For many years he led the Jewish Neolog community of Cluj, until 1944, when he left for Bucharest in the face of the danger of ghettoization and subsequent deportation of the North Transylvanian Jews to the German death camps by the fascist Hungarian authorities. From Bucharest he arrived in Mandatory Palestine, from where he then went to New York, where he pursued a career studying the history and culture of Transylvania's Hungarian-speaking Jews. After 1989 he contributed to the creation of the Carmilly-Weinberger Institute for the study of Hebrew and Jewish History, which operates within the framework of the Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca (Romania). Here he organized many conferences and lectures about the history of Transylvanian Jews, their traditions, and their culture. Among his best known works is Censorship and Freedom of Expression in Jewish History (1977).

[Paul Schveiger (2nd ed.)]