Elazar Benyoëtz (born in 1937 in Wiener Neustadt, Austria) is an Israeli writer. He was born in

Wiener Neustadt Wiener Neustadt (; Lower_Austria.html" ;"title=".e. Lower Austria">.e. Lower Austria , ) is a city located south of Vienna, in the state of Lower Austria, in northeast Austria. It is a self-governed city and the seat of the district administr ...

to a family of

Austrian Jews The history of the Jews in Austria starts after the Jewish diaspora, exodus of Jews from History of ancient Israel and Judah#Roman occupation, Judea under Roman occupation. There have been Jews in Austria since the 3rd century CE. Over the cour ...

. In 1939, the family emigrated to Israel, where he grew up speaking the

Hebrew language Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and remained in regular use as a first language unti ...

. His first volume of poetry was published in 1957, and Benyoëtz has lived as a freelance writer ever since. In 1959, he was ordained as a rabbi in Jerusalem. In 1963, he came to Berlin as part of the

Ford Foundation The Ford Foundation is an American private foundation with the stated goal of advancing human welfare. Created in 1936 by Edsel Ford and his father Henry Ford, it was originally funded by a $25,000 (about $550,000 in 2023) gift from Edsel Ford. ...

's "Artists in Residence" program, and in 1965, together with Renate Heuer, he founded the Bibliographia Judaica, to date the largest encyclopedia on German-Jewish writers. He has lived in Israel again since 1969. He is married to Renée Koppel, an Algerian-Israeli calligrapher and miniaturist who specialised in Judaica. Elazar Benyoëtz received the

Adelbert von Chamisso Prize The Adelbert von Chamisso Prize () was a German literary award established in 1985, given to a work whose author's mother tongue is not German, as was the case for Adelbert von Chamisso. It was offered by the Robert Bosch Stiftung. In addition to ...

in 1988 and has been awarded the Federal Order of Merit for his services to the German language. In 2021, Benyoëtz curated a small but essential extract of ca. 600 books from his 10,000-volume collection comprising libraries in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, which is one of the last and largest private book collections in Israel to contain the German-Jewish literary canon. He presented the selection as a gift to th
Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center
at the

Hebrew University of Jerusalem The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI; ) is an Israeli public university, public research university based in Jerusalem. Co-founded by Albert Einstein and Chaim Weizmann in July 1918, the public university officially opened on 1 April 1925. ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Benyoetz, Elazar Israeli writers Recipients of the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany 1937 births Living people Yeshivat Kfar HaRoeh alumni