Hermann Schapira

Stamps with inscribed portraits, including Hermann Schapira, ca. 1916. In the collection of the Jewish Museum of Switzerland. Zvi Hermann Schapira (; 1840–1898), or Hermann Hirsch Schapira, was a Lithuanian rabbi, mathematician at the University of Heidelberg, and Zionist. He was the first to suggest founding a Jewish National Fund for the purchase of land in Palestine.

Biography Zvi Hermann Schapira was born in a small Lithuanian town, Erswilken, not far from the larger town of Tauragė, part of the Russian Empire, but also close to the Prussian border. After studying for the rabbinate, Schapira was first appointed rabbi at age twenty-four, but then decided to dedicate his life to the secular sciences. In 1884, Schapira proposed the establishment of an organization for the acquisition of land in Eretz Yisrael and came up with the idea of the "Blue Box" as means of collecting money. He presented proposal for the creation of a Jewish national fund at the First Zionist Congress of 1897,

During a Zionist lecture tour he contracted pneumonia in Cologne, and died there on 8 May 1898.