Salomon Wininger

Salomon Wininger was born in 1877 in Gura Humorului

Wininger was born in 1877 in Gura Humorului, Bukovina, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His parents were Zlata, née Wilfer, and Shraga Feibush Wininger. His father had been smuggled from Russia to Austria as a boy to avoid service in the Russian army.

He studied in a heder and a yeshiva, then at a secondary school in Chernivtsi. He studied history at the University of Vienna from 1895 to 1897 and later finished a telegraph school in Vienna. There he joined the Zionist movement.

In 1905 he married Chava Keren, and they had 4 daughters. From 1908 he worked as an imperial postal clerk in Chernivtsi, and after World War I he managed a telephone exchange there. He set out to collect biographies of Jewish figures to counter the sense of shame he saw among Jewish students.

He published the first volume of his lexicon in 1914. Between 1925 and 1936 he published about 13,000 biographies in 7 volumes. In 1941 he was deported with the Jews of Bukovina to Transnistria, and he survived the war.

He turned down a university chair and moved to Israel in 1951. He lived in Jerusalem and Netanya, and from the late 1950s in Ramat Gan. He died in 1968 and was buried in Kiryat Shaul cemetery.