Abraham Luncz

Born in Kovno (now Kaunas, Lithuania) to a religious family, Avrom-Moyshe (Abraham Moses) Luncz was deemed an ilui, a prodigy of traditional Talmud study. In 1869, he moved with his family to Jerusalem and continued his traditional education at the Ets Ḥayim Yeshiva. Luncz was soon drawn to the Haskalah and turned his talents in less traditional directions genres. In addition to Hebrew poetry, Luncz published extensively on the history and geography of the Land of Israel in Hebrew, Yiddish, and German. He was the editor of the geographic almanacs Yerushalayim and Luaḥ erets-Yisrael (1896–1917), as well as of the Yiddish and Hebrew agricultural journal Der kolonist: ha-ikar. Luncz cofounded Jerusalem’s first public library in 1874 and also cofounded the Jewish Institute for the Blind in Jerusalem in 1902.