MEYER (MAX) VAYSBERG (MEIR WEISSBERG)

MEYER (MAX) VAYSBERG (MEIR WEISSBERG) (October 24, 1856-September 17, 1930)

            He was born in Bukaczowce, eastern Galicia, into a prominent merchant family.  He studied in religious elementary school, in a Ruthenian public school, and in the Jewish public school in Bukaczowce; he later attended high school in Lemberg and Czernowitz.  Over the years 1880-1884, he studied history and philology at the Universities of Lemberg and Vienna.  For a time he worked as a teacher of religion and administrator at a number of schools in Stryj and Stanislav, later becoming a professor of philology and religion in the state high school in the latter.  In 1814 he was a contributor to a German-Austrian literary history for the chapter on Galicia; he translated, 1917-1918, for the German weekly Polen (Poland).  During WWI he was a teacher in the Polish course of study in Vienna.  At age ten he wrote a poem in Hebrew.  From 1884 he published treatises on Jewish cultural history in Galicia in German, Polish, and Hebrew periodicals—in the monthly Hayarden (The garden) in Stanislav he published “Jewish Singers in Galicia” (1905-1906); in the Judeo-German Drohobitsher tsayung (Drogobych newspaper)—a letter from Romania, among other items; and in Moyshe Frostik’s Yiddish-language Kalenders (Calendars) in Lemberg (1909-1913).  For his monographic study in German on Velvl Zbarzh, entitled Wölwel Zbarazer, der fahrende Sänger des galizisch-jüdischen Humanismus (The traveling singer of Galician Jewish humanism) (Leipzig, 1909), 47 pp., he received his doctoral degree from Lemberg University.  In Reuven Brainin’s journal Mimizraḥ umimaarav (From the east and from the west) (1894), he published a study, “On the History of Modern Hebrew Literature in Poland.”  He was also the author of a series of works in Polish and German, among them Die neuhebräische aufklärungs-literatur in Galizien (Modern Hebrew Enlightenment literature in Galicia) (Vienna, 1898), 88 pp., among others.  A number of collections of proverbs and anecdotes from Galicia were facilitated by him and published in Urquell (Fountainhead) in Vienna and Leiden (1893-1897).  He died in Stanislav.

Sources: Zalmen Reyzen, Leksikon, vol. 1; Gershon Bader, Medina veḥakhameha (The state and its sages) (New York, 1934), p. 90.