Yakov Germanovich Gevirts

Yakov Germanovich Gevirts was born in 1879 in Odessa. From 1899 to 1906, he studied at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. In 1908, Gevirts won a competition to design a complex of buildings in the Preobrazhenskoe Jewish Cemetery. He was an active member of the Archaeological Institute and was secretary of the Society of Architectural Artists throughout the 1910s. He worked on many projects around St. Petersburg, in addition to synagogues in Kharkov, Mariupol, and Rostov-on-Don. He taught at the Academy of Arts and served as the dean of the Faculty of Architecture. He died in 1942 in Leningrad.