ROSENAK, LEOPOLD

ROSENAK, LEOPOLD (1869–1923/24), rabbi. Rosenak, who was born in Pozsonynadas, Hungary, was rabbi at Bremen, Germany, from 1896. Here he was especially active in aiding Russian and Polish Jewish refugees who passed through the port of Bremen on their way to the U.S. From 1915 to 1918 Rosenak was chaplain to the German army of occupation in Lithuania (Ober Ost), using his influence with the German authorities to alleviate the sufferings of the Jewish population. The yeshivah of slobodka , then in exile in the Ukraine, was reopened with his assistance, as was a Hebrew high school in Kovno. Rosenak died at sea on his return from a visit to the U.S., where he had sought aid for Ukrainian pogrom victims and for the new Bremen synagogue. His thesis, Fortschritt der hebraeischen Sprachwissenschaft vom 10.–13. Jahrhundert, was published in 1898, and his talmudic novellae (Ma'amar Mordekhai) were printed in Festschrift… S. Carlebach (1915).