Freidus, Abraham Solomon
FREIDUS, ABRAHAM SOLOMON
FREIDUS, ABRAHAM SOLOMON (1867–1923), U.S. librarian and bibliographer. Freidus was born in Riga, Latvia. He lived in Paris, in the Palestinian agricultural settlement of Zikhron Ya'akov, and in London before going to New York in 1889. Freidus completed a course in librarianship at Pratt Institute in 1894 and began working as a cataloger. In 1897 he was appointed first chief of the Jewish Division of the New York Public Library, where he developed the classification scheme used for Judaica; it was adopted for many other large American Judaica collections as well. Because of his remarkable bibliographical knowledge, Freidus was an indispensable guide to scholars in locating materials. The editors of the 12-volume Jewish Encyclopedia (1901–06) were especially indebted to him.
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Studies in Jewish Bibliography … in Memory of Abraham Solomon Freidus (1929), contains a list of writings by and about Freidus, xi–xvii; N. Ausubel, in: Morning Freiheit (Oct. 28, 1944), section 2, pp. 4, 6 (Eng.).
[Simcha Kruger]