Yitsḥak Epstein

Yitsḥak Epstein was born in Lyuban in the Russian Empire (today in Belarus); his family owned a mill, and his father also taught Hebrew. Given a traditional religious education until 1876, when his family moved to Odessa, he attended a maskilic gymnasium there. In Odessa he was heavily influenced by Moses Lilienblum and the nascent Ḥibat Tsiyon movement. In 1886, Epstein immigrated to Zikhron Ya‘akov, then Rosh Pina, as an agricultural pioneer; however, he left the fields in 1891 to head the new Hebrew-language school in Safed. He left Palestine in 1902 to study linguistics in Lucerne, became a professor of literature and pedagogy, and returned to Palestine in 1918 with his family. A pioneer of the ‘Ivrit be-‘ivrit (Hebrew in Hebrew) language pedagogy, he helped develop a formal Hebrew curriculum but was primarily active as a teacher.