Rosenberger, Ludwig, 1904-1987

Ludwig Rosenberger was born in Munich in 1904. His father, Moritz Rosenberger (1867-1934), was a clerk ( Prokurist ) at J. Einhorn & Comp., and his mother Amalie (née Roos) came from a family of salesmen. Possibly through his mother he is related to Lawrence K. Roos, a prominent politician in the St. Louis, Missouri region during the middle of the twentieth century. Rosenberger apprenticed and later worked as a clerk at the Munich bank H. Aufhäuser in the years 1920-1924, and then spent for years as an accountant in Israel. Sometime after 1928, he emigrated to the United States, where he developed a successful furniture wholesale business in Chicago. Although he never attended university, he became a manuscript scholar and amassed one of the largest collections of Judaica in the world, stretching back several centuries. He donated this collection to the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago.