LIEBEN, SALOMON

LIEBEN, SALOMON (1884–1942), Prague physician and communal functionary. A member of agudat israel , Lieben represented Orthodox Jews on the board of the Prague community. With the establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918, he cooperated with the Zionists and joined the Jewish National Council. He was one of the moving spirits behind the foundation of the Židovská ústrědna pro sociální péči (Central Jewish Welfare Board) in 1932. As a military physician in Galicia during World War I, he organized Jewish welfare activities there, and then in Prague for refugees from Eastern Europe. He founded a Jewish outpatients clinic and a soup kitchen, and was among the administrators of several charitable institutions. Lieben conducted scientific research in defense of sheḥitah against the numerous "humanitarian" attacks on it throughout Europe, publishing several papers in veterinary and medical periodicals claiming that sheḥitah is the least cruel method of slaughtering animals. When the Nazis entered Prague in 1939 and ordered the immediate expulsion of Jewish patients from the general hospitals, Lieben organized a hospital in the Jewish orphanage. He also saw to the religious needs of Prague Jews, organizing, for example, the illegal distribution of unleavened bread. In 1942 he was deported with his family to a concentration camp, where he died. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dos Yidishe Vort, 16:139 (1970), 27–29. (Meir Lamed) LIEBEN, SALOMON HUGO LIEBEN, SALOMON HUGO (1881–1942), historian of Bohemian Jewry, cousin of salomon lieben . Lieben received his general and Jewish education in his native Prague and taught religion in Prague German-language secondary schools. In 1906 he founded and directed the Prague Jewish museum in the ohel tohorah ("the purification hall") of the old cemetery, around which the Nazis later ordered the organization of the Central Jewish Museum (now the Prague State Jewish Museum; see museums , Jewish); Lieben was among its scientific workers. He published research papers on Bohemian Jewish history in many Jewish scientific publications, concentrating on its outstanding personalities and events, such as david oppenheim , ezekiel b. judah landau , eleazar fleckeles , Jewish printing in Prague, and the expulsion by maria theresa (1745). He exposed the Ramshak chronicle, allegedly from the hussite period, as a falsification by Marcus Fischer (see Moses fischer ). On the board of the Society for the History of the Jews in Czechoslovakia and coeditor of its yearbooks (JGGJČ) and of Die Juden in Prag (1927), he edited Die juedischen Denkmaeler in der Tschechoslowakei (1933) and collaborated with hugo gold in editing his books on the communities of Bohemia and Moravia. Lieben died in Prague. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: O. Muneles, Bibliographical Survey of Jewish Prague (1958), contains list of his publications; H. Volavkov, Story of the Jewish Museum in Prague (1968), passim. (Meir Lamed)