Simon Sofer

Simon (Shimon) Sofer was the second son of Moses Sofer and an illustrious rabbi and scholar in his own right. Sofer was born in Pressburg (present-day Bratislava), where, from an early age, he was regarded as an expert on rabbinic works and in Jewish poetry. At age twenty, he wrote a biography of his father. Simon, along with his brother Abraham Samuel Benjamin Sofer, also edited their father’s responsa. In the mid-1840s, Simon served as rabbi in Mattersdorf. In 1861, he became the chief rabbi of Kraków, where he helped found Maḥzikey ha-das in an effort to combat the Haskalah then taking root among Galician Jewry; he also ruled on such issues as the suitable placement of the bimah in synagogues. He became a member of the Austro-Hungarian parliament in 1879.