Shmaryahu Levin

Born in Svisloch in the Russian Empire (today in Belarus), Shmaryahu Levin attended yeshiva and a Minsk gymnasium, where he joined the Ḥovevei Tsiyon. He then studied in Königsberg and earned a doctorate at the University of Berlin before returning to the Russian Empire. After working as a “crown rabbi” (a state-appointed position more akin to a clerkship than to any actual rabbinic authority) in Grodno and then Ekaterinoslav, Levin received a rabbinic appointment in one of the empire’s few non-Orthodox synagogues, the Liberal congregation of Vilna. At the same time, he developed a significant profile as a writer on Jewish affairs from a Zionist perspective, publishing in Hebrew and Yiddish journals such as Aḥiasaf, Ha-Shiloaḥ, Der fraynd, Di naye velt, Dos yudishe folk, and the Forverts. He also became a political activist and indeed was elected, as a Zionist, to the Russian Empire’s First Duma amid Russia’s short-lived political liberalization during the 1905 Revolution. When the First Duma was dissolved in 1906 amid autocratic reassertion, Levin moved to the United States. He established himself as a popular speaker (in Yiddish) on the Zionist circuit in the United States, Canada, and Europe. A tireless advocate for the Technion Institute of Technology, he spent his final years in Haifa.