Ernest Klein

Vocation

Canadian linguist, author, and rabbi. Klein studied languages, philology and exact philosophy in the University of Budapest and the University of Vienna; he received his Doctorate of Philosophy from the latter in 1925. Fifty years later, in 1975 at a ceremony held in Canada by the Austrian Consulate, Klein was awarded the "Golden Ph.D" on his promotion to Doctorate of Philosophy by the University of Vienna. He was the rabbi of the Nové Zámky community, Czechoslovakia, from 1938 Érsekújvár, Hungary, now Slovak Republic, from 1929 to 1944. That year, he was deported to Auschwitz and later to the Dachau concentration camp, where he was liberated. After the war he served as rabbi in Satu Mare. After emigrating to France, he was a rabbi of the synagogue on Rue de Montevideo in Paris (1950–1951) and in 1952 he emigrated to Canada, where he held the post of Rabbi of Congregation Beth Yitshak in Toronto until his death. He is the author of A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (1966–1967). He is also the author of A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language for Readers of English (1987), an English-language etymological dictionary of Hebrew to which he devoted the last ten years of his life. He died 4 February 1983. Link to Wikipedia biography