Rabbi Yehuda Meir Shapiro, the Lubliner Rav, was born on 7 Adar 5647 (1887) in Bukovina, the son of Rabbi Yaakov Shimshon Shapiro, a descendant of Rabbi Pinchas of Koretz, and of Margula, daughter of Rabbi Shmuel Yitzchak Schor, author of the responsa Minchat Shai, with whom he studied for a time. A young prodigy known as "the prodigy of Shatz", he was ordained very young by his grandfather and other great rabbis, and also studied under the Maharsham of Berezhany, who said he had "seen him uproot mountains and grind them against each other".

Rabbi of Glina, Sanok and then Piotrków, he was one of the great figures of pre-war Polish Jewry and president of Agudat Yisrael in Poland. From 1922 to 1927 he was the first Orthodox Jew to sit as a deputy in the Polish Sejm.

In 1923, at the first world congress of Agudat Yisrael, he launched the idea of Daf Yomi: the daily study of the same page of Talmud by Jews all over the world, completing the entire Talmud in seven and a half years. The initiative today unites hundreds of thousands of people. In 1930 he inaugurated the Chachmei Lublin yeshiva, a majestic building meant to restore dignity to Torah study.

He died prematurely, at 46, on 7 Cheshvan 5694 (1933), and now rests in the Har HaMenuchot cemetery in Jerusalem.