14 Facts About Salman Schocken

Salman Schocken was born on October 30,1877, in Margonin, Posen, German Empire, the son of a Jewish shopkeeper.

Salman Schocken commissioned German Jewish architect Erich Mendelsohn to design Modernist style buildings.

Salman Schocken opened branches in Nuremberg, Stuttgart and Chemnitz.

In 1915, Salman Schocken co-founded the Zionist journal Der Jude.

In Jerusalem, he built the Salman Schocken Library, designed by Erich Mendelsohn.

Salman Schocken became a board member of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and bought the newspaper Haaretz for 23,000 pounds sterling in 1935.

In 1987 Salman Schocken Books became an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group at Random House, owned by widely diversified media corporation Bertelsmann since 1998.

Salman Schocken became a board member of the Jewish National Fund and helped with the purchase of land in the Haifa Bay area.

Salman Schocken became the patron of Shmuel Yosef Agnon during his years in Germany.

In 1940 Salman Schocken left Palestine with his family except for one son, and settled in the United States, where he founded Salman Schocken Books.

Salman Schocken died of heart failure on August 6,1959, while vacationing at an Alpine resort in Pontresina, Switzerland.

In 1910 Salman Schocken married Zerline Ehrmann, a twenty-year-old German Jewish woman from Frankfurt.

Salman Schocken had a library built in Jerusalem for his significant book collection.

On June 12,2014, a court in Berlin awarded 50 million euros to Salman Schocken's surviving heirs in Israel as part of reparations for the seizure of Schocken AG by the Nazi regime in 1938.