Kalman Shulman — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

Kalman Shulman (1819-1899), a writer and translator, was a member of the Jewish Enlightenment movement in Vilna.

Shulman was born in Bykhaw in the Mohilev region of White Russia (in the settlement area of the Russian Empire) in 1819. His father was a Habad hassid, a follower of Rabbi Aharon of Staroselye and his uncle was Naftali Hertz Shulman, one of the first members of the Enlightenment in the Russian Empire. His parents died when he was young and his relatives married him off, however, after two years of marriage he left his wife and went to study at the Volozhin Yeshiva. He spent six years at the Volozhin Yeshiva and then went to Vilna for treatment of an eye disease where he studied at the Gaon's bet hamidrash. He divorced his wife and moved to Kalvarija; he began studying German and reading books of the Enlightenment. He settled in Vilna in 1843 and lived there until his death. 

In Vilna, he worked first as a private teacher, and later on, while continuing with his Torah studies, he became interested in books of the Enlightenment and Grammar. When Montefiore visited Vilna in 1846, Shulman made a plea to him on behalf of all the villages on the border of the Pale of SettlementPale in Imperial Russia. Montefiore's private secretary, Eliezer Halevi, was so impressed by the poetic language in which the plea was written that he introduced him to the leaders of the Enlightenment Movement in Vilna; from then on he was absorbed into that circle. One of his closest friends was Micah Joseph Lebenson, the son of Adam, despite the disparity in their viewpoints.

In 1847, after Ginsburg's death, Shulman translated the elegy Kol Bochim from German to Hebrew; it was his first publication in print. He then published dozens of translations and adaptations of material, largely in the fields of geography and world history as well as the history of the Land of Israel; he aimed to spread the values of the Enlightenment to the Jews of Eastern Europe. In 1849 he was appointed a teacher at the Reali high school adjacent to the Vilna Rabbinical College but he retired from the position two years later and earned his living as a writer. The Rom publishing house paid him for his books and the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia ordered treatises from him. He remarried in 1851.

Translated from: Wikipedia