Funeral services were held today for Solomon Shapiro, noted American Jewish educator, who died yesterday morning at Coney Island Hospital, after a short illness. He would have been 84 on Saturday. Mr. Shapiro was one of the founders of the Jewish Folk Schools of the Labor Zionist Movement more than 60 years ago and was instrumental in introducing many programmatic changes and progressive features into the Jewish educational system in this country. For more than a half-century, he taught in and was the principal of Jewish Folk Schools in New York, Syracuse, Milwaukee and Philadelphia.
In the 1920s he was the director of the National Committee for the Jewish Folk Schools and later served as chairman and honorary chairman of the committee. He was a founder in 1926 of Camp Kinderwelt at Highland Mills, N.Y., an educational summer camp sponsored by Farband-Labor Zionist Order, which he directed for many years. Mr. Shapiro was the author, translator or editor of several text books for the Jewish schools, and he was a founder and editor of “Kinderwelt,” a monthly magazine in Yiddish and Hebrew for children which appeared in the 1920s and 1930s. He was the father of Dr. Judah J. Shapiro, president of the Labor Zionist Alliance, and Dr. Manheim Shapiro, a noted sociologist.
Reporting the stories that define our era. When history unfolds in real-time, the Jewish world turns to JTA. Your support ensures we can document the complexities of war and the resilience of Jewish communities with integrity.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
