Schechter, Solomon, 1847-1915

Solomon Schechter was born in Focşani, Moldavia. In 1890 he was appointed to the faculty at Cambridge University, serving as a lecturer in Talmudics and reader in Rabbinics. His greatest academic fame came from his excavation in 1896 of the papers of the Cairo Geniza, an extraordinary collection of over 100,000 pages of rare Hebrew religious manuscripts and medieval Jewish texts that were preserved at an Egyptian synagogue. The find revolutionized the study of Medieval Judaism.

Schechter served as the second President of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, from 1902 to 1915, during which time he founded the United Synagogue of America, later renamed as the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism.