Joseph Luria

Born in Pumpian (today Pumpenai, Lithuania) to an affluent family, Joseph Luria studied in heder and later a Russian gymnasium in Romny (today in Ukraine) before attending the University of Berlin, where he was involved in Zionist circles. After completing his doctorate in Berne in 1896, Luria moved to Warsaw and founded a heder metukan—a term meaning “improved heder” but referring to a school teaching both a modernized “three Rs” curriculum and Jewish national ideas alongside or increasingly in lieu of traditional Jewish text-study. He also assumed the editorship of the Zionist Yiddish weekly Der yud and went on to edit the first Yiddish daily in the Russian Empire Der fraynd; though a committed Hebraist, he helped ensure that both journals would make space for the best Yiddish prose of the day, including some of the most important work of Y. L. Peretz and Sholem Aleichem. Luria immigrated to Palestine in 1907, where he worked as a correspondent for European Zionist journals, taught history at the Herzliya Gymnasium, and served in the Hebrew teachers’ union and the national educational committee. He also served as an editor of Ha’aretz from 1919 to 1922.