Kaplan family photograph

Chaim Aron Kaplan was born in Horodyszcze (Haradzisca), in what is now Belarus, in 1880. He received a Talmudic education at the Yeshiva of Mir, and then studied at the Government Pedagogical Institute in Vilna (Vilnius). Settling in Warsaw in 1902, he established a Hebrew primary school, which he served as the principal of for the next 40 years. He was an advocate of teaching Hebrew as a spoken language, and published several textbooks based on this method. Kaplan visited Palestine in 1936, hoping to settle there, but returned to Warsaw that same year. Kaplan began keeping a diary in Hebrew in 1933, and with the start of World War II in 1939, made a conscious decision to continue doing so, in order to record the events he was eyewitness to, including after he was interned in the Warsaw Ghetto. His diary ended in early August 1942, at which time he had the diary smuggled out of the ghetto for preservation. It is presumed that he was arrested during the round-ups that were taking place in the ghetto at that time, and deported to Treblinka, where he perished. (Source: adapted from Abraham Katsh, introduction to "Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan")