Albert Siegfried Bettelheim

Rabbi Dr. Albert (Aaron) Siegfried Bettelheim (1830-1890), born in Galgoc, Hungary, was a scholar, writer, educator, and rabbi in Europe and the United States. He began his education at the yeshivah of Presburg, and afterward studied in the Talmudical schools at Leipnik, Moravia, and Prague; enjoying the tutelage of S. L. Rapoport, from whom, at the age of eighteen, he received his semikhah. Rabbi Bettelheim officiated for a short time as rabbi and religious teacher at Münchengrätz, and then returned to Prague to enter the university, whence he graduated with the degree of Ph.D. In 1850, and for several years thereafter, Bettelheim was the Austrian correspondent of a number of London journals, and acted as private tutor ("Hofmeister") to Count Forgács, then governor of Bohemia, and afterward Hungarian court-chancellor. In the early fifties Bettelheim came to Temesvár, Hungary, where he was director of the Jewish schools and editor of a political weekly called Elöre (Forward). In 1856 he became the "official translator of Oriental languages and censor of Hebrew books" at Czernowitz, where, in 1858, he married Henrietta Weintraub, the first female Jewish public-school teacher in Hungary. In 1860 he became rabbi at Komorn, Hungary, where he was appointed superintendent of all the schools—the first Jew to gain such a distinction. Thence he went to Kaschau [Slowakei], where he officiated as rabbi until 1862. While at Kaschau he edited a Jewish weekly, Der Jude, to combat the views of the Jewish Congress, then holding animated conventions at Budapest. There, too, he edited a political weekly, whose progressive ideas were discountenanced by his congregation and held to be prejudicial to Judaism. The fanaticism of his people became so pronounced that, being threatened with excommunication by one of the colleagues of his former domicile in Komorn, he decided to emigrate to America with his family. In 1867 Bettelheim was elected rabbi of the Crown street congregation (now Beth Israel) of Philadelphia, and became a professor at the Maimonides College. In 1869 he became rabbi of congregation Beth Ahabah, of Richmond, Virginia, where he established and edited a German weekly, Der Patriot (afterward changed into a daily, with the title The State Gazette). While in Richmond he entered the Medical College, and was graduated with the degree of M.D. He intended to write a work on Jewish medicine, and has left behind a number of monographs and other documentary material not yet published. In 1875 he was elected rabbi of the Ohabai Shalom congregation of San Francisco, California, where he became chairman of the Society for the Study of Hebrew, composed entirely of Christian clergymen, and director of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. He held other public offices, and delivered the baccalaureate sermon at various high schools and colleges. He occupied the pulpits of the Unitarian and Baptist churches in San Francisco, and afterward in Baltimore, where, in 1887, he became rabbi of the First Baltimore Hebrew Congregation, an office he held till his death. In Baltimore he became identified with a number of public institutions and charitable organizations, and instructed some non-Jews in the elements of the Hebrew language. While on the homeward voyage from a visit to Europe, he died on board ship, and was buried Aug. 21, 1900. Two Catholic priests, whose acquaintance Bettelheim had made on the voyage, read the Jewish burial service and recited the "Kaddish" as the body was lowered into the sea. He was the art critic of a prominent San Francisco journal; coeditor of the Jewish Times of San Francisco, from 1880 to 1886; a regular contributor to the Argonaut of that city; a frequent contributor to the Jewish Exponent of Philadelphia, and the Menorah Monthly in New York. He was the author of Jewish stories, two of which—"Yentil the Milk-Carrier" and "The Baal-Milhamah-Rabbi"—were translated into German, Hungarian, and Hebrew. He was at work for over twenty years on a Revised English Bible, about three-fourths of which he had completed in manuscript at the time of his death. Many of his suggestions and scholarly notes are incorporated in the last two volumes of Kohut's Aruch Completum.