ישראל טאגליכט

Rav Yisrael Taglicht (5622/1862–5704/1943) served as chief rabbi of Vienna. He was born on 9 March 1862 in Berezó in Hungary to Yosef Taglicht and Nelly Spitzer, and was a descendant of the Maharam Schick. After cheder and yeshiva and his general schooling he went to Berlin, enrolling in its Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums while also attending the city’s university, from which he took a doctorate in 1888; he received semichah the year after. He married Rachel Rappaport in 1892.

His first position was the small Moravian town of Ungarisch-Ostra, where he served four years. In 1893 he was appointed to the Mariahilf community, covering Vienna’s sixth and seventh districts, and after fourteen years there was elected rav of the fourteenth and fifteenth; in 1910 he took over the rabbinic office of Max Grunwald. In 1932 he became rav of the Leopoldstädter Tempel, the main shul of Vienna, and in 1937 was named chief rabbi of the city. He wrote studies in German on Tanach, on Jewish cultural history and on the questions of his own day, and worked with YIVO in Vienna, publishing two studies in Yiddish.

In October 1935 his daughter Edith, a teacher in the Jewish schools of Berlin, was arrested by the Gestapo over an anti-Nazi article that her friends insisted she had never written, and was held in Moabit prison; her father went to Berlin himself and gathered promises of help, but five months passed before she was freed. In 1938 the Nazis took all his books and manuscripts, among them the unpublished eleventh volume of his Forschungen zur Geschichte der Juden in Österreich. That April, walking home from davening on Shabbat, he was made to stand with a placard outside two Jewish businesses, and was let go only when a Jewish patron volunteered to stand in his place. A few months before the war he reached England, and he was niftar in Cambridge on 13 December 1943, where his levayah was held.

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