Ben-Zion Witler

Who was Ben-Zion Witler?

Ben-Zion Witler, 1907–1961, Jewish singer, actor, coupletist, comedian and composer.

At the age of six Witler moved with his family from Belz to Vienna, where he received a strict Chasidic religious upbringing; fearing his family's reaction, in 1919 he secretly joined the "Free Jewish Folksbiene" under an alias. He worked briefly as a journalist at the German Zionist weekly Wiener Morgenzeitung but in 1926 returned to the Vienna theater scene, performing in comedies and operettas, studying opera repertoire with Yulianovsky and Fuchs, touring. He spent three years in Poland in the mid-1930s, becoming a "public darling." In 1937 he appeared in Riga in A Khasene in Shtetl and The Galitzian Wedding by William Siegel. Some of his many other starring roles were in Yanko the Gypsy, A Millionaire's Caprice, The American Litvak, The Brave Officer, The Bandit Gentleman, The Strength of Love, The Bride with Three Brothers, The Golden Bridegroom, The Threshold of Joy, It's Hard to be a Jew by Sholom Aleichem, Ansky's The Dybbuk, Jacob Mikhailovich Gordin's God, Man and Devil, and David Pinski's Yankel the Smith.