Avraham Rosenstein (1906-1925)
He was born in Minsk, Belarus. His father ran a Jewish school which he attended prior to entering a yeshiva.
While he emigrated to Palestine, his father remained in the Soviet Union, where he would become imprisoned for his Zionist activism.
Avraham Even-Shosham (1925-1984)
Upon settling in Palestine in 1925, he changed his name to Avraham Even-Shosham. This may be a calque translation of his original surname Rosenstein, which means rose stone; hence Rosenstein directly translated into Even-Shosham. It is a very interesting subversion of the diasporic identity into an Israeli one.
After working as a laborer, Even-Shosham eventually studied at the College for Hebrew Teachers and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
He is most known for compiling the dictionary of the Hebrew language in its modern form in what would be called the Even-Shosham Dictionary. He worked on it for more than a decade. It contains 25,000 entries and 70,000 words, including Semitic cognates in Aramaic, Akkadian, Arabic, and Ugaritic.
He died in Tel Aviv at the age of 77.
Sources
Fontoi
- \”Linguist Avraham Even-Shoshan Dies.\” CIE.