The Heder in Lithuania

Born near Bobruisk (today in Belarus) into the family of a teacher in a traditional Jewish school (heder), Felix Shapiro received a standard religious education but pursued a modern path. In 1904, he finished dentistry school in Kharkov (now Kharkiv, Ukraine); this professional degree allowed him to settle in St. Petersburg. Shapiro studied law at St. Petersburg University, taught Hebrew, and worked for the Society for the Promotion of Culture Among the Jews of Russia (OPE), an organization that drew together elements devoted to civic Russification of Jews and the reform of Jewish education to that end. Working for the OPE’s Elementary Education Commission, he surveyed the work of Jewish schools across the Pale of Settlement and published articles on educational practice and reform in the Russian Jewish press. In 1913, Shapiro was invited to head a Jewish school in Baku. After the October Revolution, he took an active part in the development of Jewish education in the Soviet Union, and in the 1920s, he moved to Moscow. In 1954, Shapiro began work on his Hebrew-Russian dictionary, which was published posthumously, in 1963.