The newspaper “Ha-Mashkif” (“The Observer”), issued in Mandatory Palestine, published a short obituary dedicated to the famous pianist and music professor David Shor on June 1, 1942. The text also paid attention to the fact that the deceased Shor in the last days of his life was one of the leaders of the League in Defense of Soviet Russia, or League “V” (from the English word “Victory”). The League, consisting of immigrants from Russia, intended to help the USSR in the fight against Nazi Germany.

David Solomonovich Shor did not have any special sympathy for the Bolsheviks, but he considered the most important mission of his life to save people. For this reason, he found it possible to cooperate with the communists, who, by the will of fate, became the defenders of the Jews who remained in the Soviet Union. A decade and a half earlier, he had snatched people from the clutches of the VChK-GPU and selflessly fought against the offensive of the “Yevsektsiya” employees against Hebrew and Jewish culture. He could not do otherwise, following the credo of his idol, the great humanist Beethoven.

David Shor was born in Simferopol on January 15, 1867 in the family of Solomon Shor and Dina Dukat. Besides David, the family had four more sons: Roman, Alexander, Joseph and Lev. The family was traditional rather than deeply religious. Children and parents went to the synagogue quite regularly, and as a child little David was sent to study at the cheder.

Although Solomon Shor spent his entire life doing boring accounting, he always dreamed of becoming a musician. The love of music was passed on to his children. The eldest, Leva, elder brother of David Solomonovich, graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory and was a well-known devotee of music education in Penza. Another brother, Alexander, became a well-known piano tuner throughout Moscow. David himself began to study music with his father at the age of seven, and the next year he was already superbly performing the relatively simple but exquisite “Piano Sonata No. 19 in G minor” by Beethoven.

In 1877, together with his father, David went to the capital of the Russian Empire - St. Petersburg - to enter the conservatory. Although in Simferopol music was not considered a worthy specialty, Solomon Shor was not going to listen to anyone, dreaming of giving another of his children a professional music education. In order for a ten-year-old Jewish boy to be accepted to study, Solomon Shor had to use all sorts of connections, and all his efforts were successful. Having passed the audition brilliantly, young David Shor became a student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory of the Imperial Russian Musical Society.


In the first years, Shor changed many piano teachers, but in the end, pianist Vasily Safonov became his teacher, who educated many world-famous musicians. Having been transferred to the Moscow Conservatory, Safonov took the student with him. In Moscow, Shor had close contact with the aspiring composers Sergei Rachmaninov and Anton Arensky, his talent developed surrounded by music professors Sergei Taneyev and Nikolai Zverev, and contemporary classicists Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

In Moscow, David began giving private lessons, earning a living. His part-time job brought him to the house of Raisa Muller, whom David Solomonovich fell in love with. Raisa Mikhailovna reciprocated the young teacher’s feelings. In March, 1887, the couple got married, and two years later the Shors had a daughter, Miri.

However, the cloudless years of studying music and the first steps as the head of the family were significantly darkened after David Shor graduated from the conservatory. Vasily Safonov, having become the director of the conservatory in the spring of 1889, offered Shor the position of adjunct - on the condition of converting to Christian Orthodoxy. David Solomonovich could not betray his faith and roots, even though he listened to the old professor’s lecture that such chances befall a person once in a lifetime.

In 1890, the Shors had their youngest daughter, Evgenia, and a year later, their son, Yevsey. Something had to be done to find a stable income, but Safonov’s firm refusal put an end to David Solomonovich’s academic career. Shor had to agree to a place at the less prestigious women's Elizabethan Institute. However, a few years later his former teacher again offered him a position of professor at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. This time there was no talk about changing religion, and David Solomonovich even began to prepare a list of future students, but at the very last moment, his candidacy, showing cowardice, was not approved by the artistic council of the conservatory.

The third time David Solomonovich was rejected in 1901, when, on the recommendation of the famous pianist and conductor Alexander Ziloti, he was offered the position of director of the Music and Drama School of the Moscow Philharmonic Society. Members of the directorate of the Philharmonic Society initially considered him a baptized Jew, and even mistook his wife for a Russian, but Shor was forced to disappoint his employers again.

If David Solomonovich had to forget about his career as a music professor for a while, then in the musical field everything was going well. In 1892, together with violinist David Crane and cellist Modest Altsсhuler, Shor founded “The Moscow Trio”. In 1896, after Modest Altshuler emigrated to America, the place of cellist in the Shor Trio, as the music band was also called, was taken by a graduate of the Prague Conservatory, Rudolf Ehrlich. Together with his colleagues, David Solomonovich followed the ideas of Anton Rubinstein, consistently combining works of classics and modern composers in his repertoire. The trio successfully toured in London, Berlin, Paris, traveled to various Russian cities, and performed at the estate of Leo Tolstoy.

Having received recognition as a musician over the years of active creative activity, Shor, according to him, gradually began to feel a growing creative crisis. In 1904, Shor writes about the “spiritual upheaval” in his life and the “reassessment of values” that led him to one of the most important missions of his life – the construction of a Jewish home in Eretz Israel.

In April 1907, still on a spiritual quest and having temporarily left the Moscow Trio, David and his father made a five-week trip to Palestine. The musician was struck by the completely biblical pictures, and also by the harshness and anti-Semitism of Ivan Bunin, with whom he traveled together. But the main thing was that he felt like home in Eretz Israel. In the Holy Land, the musician was struck by the completely biblical pictures of Jerusalem, Nazareth, Lake Gennesaret, Galilee, the Dead Sea and other places, and even more so by the harshness and anti-Semitism of Ivan Bunin, whom he met on the ship and traveled together with.

But the main thing was that throughout his stay in Eretz Israel he felt like a man who had come home. Everything was “dear and close” to him. Especially local Jews, devoid of any fear or complexes. What impressed him most were the Jewish children from the colonies, joyful and free, singing as they walked home from school.

David Shor shared his impressions of his trip to Eretz Israel in a report made in 1908 and partially published on the pages of the Zionist weekly “Rassvet” (“Dawn”), published in St. Petersburg. According to him, having given a lecture-concert in Jerusalem in early May 1907, he came to the conclusion that the development of the arts should be encouraged at all costs in the historical homeland of Jewry. On their native soil, devoid of fears and “breaks,” Jewish musicians and artists will be able to say their own, pure Jewish word in world culture.

Changed after his trip to Palestine, David Solomonovich actively became involved in the life of Jewish society in Moscow. Taking advantage of his fame, Shor began to organize concerts in favor of Jewish students, as well as to contribute in every possible way to all the endeavors of the educational organization the “Society for the Dissemination of Education among Jews in Russia”.

His next step was the establishment on March 4, 1908 of the Society for Jewish Folk Music, created with the goal of promoting the study and development of Jewish folk music in Russia, both sacred and secular. His co-founders were composer and musicologist Shlomo Rosowsky, pianist and music critic David Chernomordikov, teachers and folklorists Zinoviy Kiselgof and Joel Engel.

Simultaneously with activities in the national field, David Shor continued to work on popularizing the work of his idol, Beethoven. In 1911, with the support of the “tea magnate” and philanthropist David Vysotsky, Shor finally fulfilled his long-time dream – he opened the Beethoven Studio. In his studio, Shor organized cycles of historical concerts, concert-lectures and musical evenings. His son, Yevsey Davidovich Shor, ran the publishing house at the studio. The Beethoven Studio existed until the October Revolution of 1917.
David Solomonovich met the turbulent revolutionary times with a whole range of feelings. On the one hand, the equality of all nationalities declared by the Bolsheviks greatly appealed to him. In 1918, he began teaching piano and chamber ensemble classes at the Moscow Conservatory, and in 1919 he was finally awarded the title of professor, something that was unthinkable under Tsarism. However, the declared liberties did not apply to everyone. Thus, the freedom of the followers of Zionism, to which David Shor considered himself, had to be snatched from the authorities in a sacred but unequal struggle.

In 1921, after the arrests of participants in the Moscow Zionist Conference, David Shor, on his own initiative, began to intercede with the People's Commissar of Justice of the RSFSR Dmitry Kursky on behalf of his friend, the manufacturer Fievel Shapiro. Then he stood up for all the arrested Zionists. His efforts were not limited to visiting offices. Having received permission from a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) Lev Kamenev, a longtime admirer of the work of the Moscow Trio, in order to hold an evening in memory of Theodor Herzl, Shor decided to give a speech to the crowd. in support of the imprisoned Zionists. Having declared his support for the imprisoned Zionists from the stage, David Solomonovich called on those present to express sympathy for the prisoners. The audience, which numbered about 2,000 people, rose and sang the Zionist anthem, “Ha-Tikvah,” in unison. Shor then got away with the demarche.

Regular concerts for the party elite – from Stalin to Trotsky – still allowed David Solomonovich to play with fire. When it was possible to end up in the Northern camps of the GPU and not for such offenses, Shor dared to ask Kamenev and Deputy Chairman of the USSR Central Executive Committee Pyotr Smidovich to commute the sentences for Zionists. In December 1923, the musician stood up not only for people, but for the right to freely teach the “Jewish language” – Hebrew.

In 1924, together with the famous Indologist Mikhail Tubyansky, composer Mikhail Gnesin, poet Dovid Hofshtein and other public figures, David Shor decided to seek protection from Agro-Joint, an American charitable organization that had a contractual relationship with the Soviet government. Gathering in the Moscow office of Agro-Joint, Jewish activists decided to approach the Soviet authorities with a memorandum in which they hoped to “explain that only a ‘misunderstanding’ could have created the ban on the language.” Despite all their efforts, the Kremlin trusted the former Bundists from the Yevsektsiya in matters of language, and de facto banned the use and teaching of Hebrew in the Soviet Union.