Shlomo Zev Zweigenhaft

Shlomo Zev Zweigenhaft (Hebrew: ) was a rabbi who was Rosh Hashochtim of Poland (overseeing the country's kosher slaughterers) before the Holocaust.

After the Holocaust he was Chief Rabbi of Hanover and Lower Saxony.

After emigrating to the United States he was a Rav Hamachshir (kosher certifier) and was described as the "foremost authority on shechita" (kosher slaughter).

Rabbi Zweigenhaft was born in Sosnowiec Poland in 1915.

His mother, Michla, was a daughter of Meir Dovid Reinhertz, a Rabbi who was a son of the Rabbi of Yanov and a grandson of the Rabbi of Przedbórz.

Zweigenhaft's father, Rabbi Moshe Chaim, was a shochet (kosher slaughterer) and a student of Avrohom Bornsztain.

Zweigenhaft was orphaned at the age of two and was raised by his paternal grandfather, Efraim Mordechai Mottel Zweigenhaft, who was a posek and shochet in Sosnowiec and a descendant of David HaLevi Segal and Joel Sirkis.

Rabbi Zweigenhaft studied at a Radomsker cheder in Sosnowiec until the age of 12.

For the next two years he was a student of Dov Berish Einhorn in Amstov.

At the age of 14 he had memorized the gemara of the entire massekhtot of zevachim and menachot with the commentaries of Rashi and Tosafot He then returned to Sosnowiec where he was a student of David Moshe Rabinowicz in Kibbutz Govoha Yeshiva.

When Zweigenhaft was 16 years old he began to study privately with Aryeh Tzvi Frumer from whom he received rabbinical ordination two years later.

This was an extremely rare achievement, considering that Frumer only ordained a total of 5 out of several hundred students over the course of his life.

David Avraham Mandelbaum, in Frummer's biography describes Zweigenhaft as an example of one of the "best" Talmudic students in Poland.

Mandelbaum also describes Zweigenhaft's relationship with Frumer as "extremely close".

Rabbi Zweigenhaft's father, grandfather and great-grandfather were shochtim.

As a young boy Zweigenhaft had been privy to his family's masorah (transmission of Jewish religious tradition) of shechita stretching back hundreds of years.

When Zweigenhaft was 14 years old and still studying in Amstov, the shochtim of the city encountered a halachic difficulty and summoned Dov Berish Einhorn for assistance.

Einhorn asked Zweigenhaft to accompany him on his walk to the slaughterhouse.

When they arrived, Einhorn began to contemplate the problem that the shochtim presented to him.

Zweigenhaft then proceeded to deftly pick up the chalef (shechitah knife) and demonstrated how to perform the shechitah and resolved their issue.

Einhorn was so impressed that from then on he would only eat meat if it was slaughtered by Zweigenhaft despite his youth.

Shortly thereafter, Rabbi Einhorn proudly told Yitzchok Mordechai Rabinowicz (Chief Rabbi of Polavno) about Zweigenhaft.

Rabinowicz requested that Einhorn send Zweigenhaft to him and then proceeded to teach Zweigenhaft the masorah of shechita that he had learned from his grandfather the Tiferes Shlomo of Radomsk.

Thereafter, the Radomsker Rebbe would only eat meat from Zweigenhaft's Shechita.

Year later, when the Minchas Elazar of Munkach visited Sosnowiec, he too would only eat from Zweigenhaft's shechitah.

By the time he was 20, he was the shochet of several cities in Poland, including Radomsk, Polavno, Amstov, Volbrum, Elkish and Tchebin, and was the Rosh Hashochtim of Sosnowiec.

In the mid-1930s Zweigenhaft was appointed one of the seven members of the Vaad Roshei Hashochtim of Poland and Lithuania a board of seven rabbis overseeing thousands of shochtim throughout Poland.

In 1936, a bill outlawing Shechitah was introduced in the Sejm (Polish legislature).

Despite being the youngest member of the Vaad, Zweigenhaft was selected to perform Shechita in front of the assembled legislators and demonstrate that shechitah was a quick humane form of animal slaughter.

Together with an intense lobbying effort, this led to the Sejm allowing the practice to continue, although it was restricted with a maximum quota.

Zweigenhaft was later appointed to be the head of the Vaad

Zweigenhaft survived the Holocaust and was liberated in Bergen Belsen on April 11, 1945.

Zweigenhaft retreiced a chalef (shechitah knife) from a museum in Hamburg and on August 21, 1945, he performed the first known kosher slaughter in Germany since it was outlawed by the Nazis in 1933.

Thereafter, the British Chief Rabbi's Religious Emergency Council appointed Zweigenhaft to be the Rosh Hashochtim of the British Zone of Germany.

On November 7, 1945, the British Chief Rabbi's Religious Emergency Council established two large kitchens in Celle to provide kosher food for the thousands of Jewish survivors living in the nearby Bergen-Belsen D.P. Camp and appointed Zweigenhaft to be the Rav Hamachshir of Bergen-Belsen.

Zweigenhaft was appointed to be one of the rabbis on the Vaad Harabonim (Board of Rabbis) of The British Zone, which was established and led by Yoel Halpern.

Since Zweigenhaft was constantly traveling throughout the zone to oversee and make arrangements related to shechitah, he was tasked by the Vaad to serve as the rabbi of several smaller Jewish communities in the British Zone that did not have their own rabbi.

In the months after the liberation of Bergen Belsen, Jewish survivors slowly began to leave the D.P. Camp and settle in towns and cities throughout the British Zone.

When the nascent community of Jewish survivors in Hannover became large enough to warrant its own Rabbi, Zweigenhaft recommended to the British Chief Rabbi's Religious Emergency Council to appoint his friend (and future brother-in-law) Chaim Pinchas Lubinsky to the position.

In January 1946 Lubinsky was appointed Chief Rabbi of Hannover.