sentences:  Zvi Hermann Schapira was born in Erswilken, near Tauragė, a small town in Lithuania.He studied for the rabbinate and was appointed to a rabbinical position at the age of twenty-four, but then decided to devote his life to the secular sciences.He went first to Odessa and later (1868) to Berlin, where he studied for three years in the Gewerbeakademie.