Literatureאלעזר בניועץ

Elazar Ben-Yoets

Elazar Benyoëtz is an Israeli poet, writer and translator who writes about German-Jewish authors and founded the Bibliographia Judaica.

born 1937Hebrew and German poetryFounding the Bibliographia JudaicaResearch on German-Jewish writers

Born: 24 March 1937, Wiener Neustadt
Occupation: writer, poet, translator, bibliographer
Education: Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Elazar Ben-Yoets was born in 1937 in Wiener Neustadt

Elazar Benyoëtz was born on March 24, 1937, in Wiener Neustadt, Austria, to a family of Austrian Jews. As a child he moved with his family to the Land of Israel, where he grew up speaking Hebrew.

He studied in the religious Zionist school system, in Kfar Ata and at the Kfar HaRoeh yeshiva. He was ordained as a rabbi in Jerusalem in 1959. He later studied literature and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

His first book of poems, Beini Levein Atzmi, came out in 1957, and he has worked as a freelance writer since then. He worked as a librarian and archivist at Mossad HaRav Kook and at the Genazim Institute. In 1963 he went to Berlin with a Ford Foundation program, and in 1965 he founded the Bibliographia Judaica with Renate Heuer.

He has lived in Israel again since 1969. He published poetry, translations from Yiddish and German, and essays of literary criticism. He received the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize in 1988 and the German Federal Order of Merit.

He is married to Renée Koppel, a calligrapher and miniaturist. In 2021 he gave about 600 books from his collection to the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center at the Hebrew University.