Meyer Weisgal
Meyer Wolf Weisgal was an American journalist, publisher, playwright, fundraiser, and Zionist activist who served as the President of the Weizmann Institute of Science and as the founding President of Beit Hatfutsot.
Biography
Meyer Wolf Weisgal was born to a Jewish family in Kikół, Congress Poland, in the Pale of Settlement. He emigrated to New York City, US in 1905 with his parents at age 11, where he finished high school at Morris High School in the Bronx and studied journalism at Columbia University. He married Shirley in 1923.Meyer and Shirley Weisgal lived on the grounds of the Weizmann Institute and are buried there, near the Chaim Weizmann House.
Literary and journalism career
In 1926, he published the first English translation of the works of Chaim Nachman Bialik. In 1932, he saw stage success with the play "The romance of a people", and he continued to produce stage plays from then on. He conceived the opera-oratorio The Eternal Road to alert the then-ignorant public to Hitler's persecution of the Jews in 1937 Germany. Weisgal enlisted the help of director Max Reinhardt, who approached Kurt Weill to write the music, and Austrian novelist and playwright Franz Werfel to write the libretto for The Eternal Road, translated into English by Ludwig Lewisohn.Together with Louis Lipsky he edited the journal The Maccabean-magazine, later The New Palestine (magazine), which contributed its important part for the success of Chaim Weizmann's Zionist policy after the Balfour Declaration. And he, "as editor, conceived and published two notable supplements, which remain as permanent reference works today: In 1925 a supplement on the Hebrew University, then in establishment; in 1929 a supplement on Theodor Herzl, founder of the modern Zionism"., See also the series about him on Brouillon, part 4: