שמואל בטלהיים

Samuel Bettelheim (1872-1942), early Zionist and Mizrachi leader and journalist, born in Pressburg (then part of the Austria-Hungary, now Bratislava, Slovakia), where he received a religious and secular education. Under the influence of Theodor Herzl he formed the first Zionist association in Hungary in 1897, and served as its president for three years. He organized the first Zionist Conference in Pressburg. Chief Rabbi Reines commissioned him to organize the first world congress of the Mizrachi movement (1904). Bettelheim served as the Hungarian representative at the committee of World Zionists for seven years. In 1908, he published and edited the Zionist weekly, Ungarlaendische Juedische Zeitung, which was published in Budapest. During World War I, the Austro-Hungarian government sent him on a mission to the United States to influence American Jewry in its favor. In 1917 he enlisted in the army.

After WW1, he became one of the leading Zionists in Czechoslovakia. However, he opposed many of the political and cultural activities of the Zionist Organization, and later he joined the anti-Zionist Agudat Israel. He edited their newspaper Juedische Presse in Bratislava and Vienna and from 1922 Juedische Zeitung in Bratislava, where he propounded the views of Agudat Israel. In 1934-35, he published in Bratislava a German-language monthly called Judaica, devoted to Jewish literature and history. For some years he lived in the Unites States, where he published the Jewish Weekly Bulletin. However, he returned to Hungary and during his last years he was a correspondent for foreign newspapers.