Avraham Even-Shoshan

Avraham Rosenstein, later Avraham Even-Shoshan, was born in Minsk, Belarus in 1906. He attended the cheder run by his father, who later sent him to public school and yeshiva.[1]

Rosenstein managed to avoid the British restrictions on Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine and settled there in 1925, where he changed his name to Even-Shoshan, a translation of Rosenstein, and initially worked as a laborer. He studied at the College for Hebrew Teachers (now the David Yellin Academic College of Education)[2] in Jerusalem and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.[3] He worked as a teacher in Jerusalem until 1967.

In 1946-58, Even-Shoshan compiled HaMilon HeHadash (New Dictionary of the Hebrew Language), which since 2003 has become known as the Even-Shoshan Dictionary. The completed dictionary consisted of 24,698 main entries and about 70,000 words, and is still in print.[3][1] It includes synonyms in Arabic, Aramaic, Akkadian, and Ugaritic. He was also the author of the Even-Shoshan concordance and co-author of the Bialik concordance.

Even-Shoshan died in the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem in 1984. He was buried in the Har HaMenuchot.

• In 1978, Even-Shoshan was awarded the Israel Prize, for language.[4]
• In 1981, he was the co-recipient (jointly with Zev Vilnay) of the Bialik Prize for Jewish thought.[5]

• A New Concordance of the Bible: Thesaurus of the Language of the Bible, Hebrew and Aramaic, Roots, Words, Proper Names Phrases and Synonyms (1984)

• List of Israel Prize recipients
• List of Bialik Prize recipients