Solomon Schechter

Solomon Schechter was a Moldavian-born rabbi, scholar, and educator, most famous for his 1896 discovery and conservation of a collection of some three hundred thousand ancient Jewish manuscripts and fragments in the Geniza, or storeroom, of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Cairo, Egypt. Among his discoveries was the previously unknown Hebrew original of the apocryphal Ecclesiasticus or Book of Sirach.

Educated in Talmud in Vienna, Berlin, and London, and in secular learning at the University of Berlin, Schechter was appointed in 1890 as lecturer in Talmud and reader in Rabbinics at Cambridge University. In 1899, he became Professor of Hebrew at University College London. In 1902, Schechter left London to become the second chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) of America in New York, where he helped shape a generation of scholars and communal leaders and became the founder of the movement now known as Conservative Judaism. He developed JTS into a major center for research in Judaica and for the training of rabbis in Conservative Judaism. In 1913, he founded the United Synagogue of America (now United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism), a network that eventually grew from twenty-two to more than six hundred congregations.