Seraj Szapszal (1873-1961) A hakham and leader of the Lithuanian Karaite community.

Szapszal was born in Chufut Kale and studied at St. Petersburg University, where he received a doctorate in philology and Oriental languages. He was invited to serve as the personal tutor of the Iranian crown prince, Mohammad Ali Shah, and became a minister in the Persian government in 1907 (rumor had it that he was a Russian spy). In 1911 he returned to the Crimea and became Chief Hakham of the Crimean Karaite communities.

From 1919 to 1927 he lived in Istanbul. In 1927 he moved to Vilna, and became the head of the Karaim in Poland. A philosophical disciple of Avraham Firkovitch, he took Firkovitch's ideas to extremes, denying any connection between Karaim and Rabbinic Jews. In 1941 he met with Nazi authorities and was instrumental in the formulation of their policy towards the Karaim. As Hakham of Vilna he was infamous for his confrontations with such Jewish community figures as Zelig Kalmanovich , and having given to the Nazis a detailed list of the members of the Karaite communities of Troki and Vilnius, allowing them to easily discover and arrest Jews who had forged papers stating that they were Karaim.

After the war he lived in Troki and later Vilna, teaching at the Soviet-dominated Lithuanian Academy of Sciences. He co-authored of a Karaim-­Russian-­Polish dictionary (published in 1974) and wrote a number of articles on the Karaites of the Crimea. His "History of the Karaites" remains unpublished. Part of his collections and books are kept in a small museum in the old synagogue of Troki, where he died in 1961.

Many Jews regard his actions as having condemned their co-religionists to extermination, and accuse him of making a "death list". Szapszal and his defenders maintain that had he not acted as he did, he and the other Karaim of Lithuania would have been put in danger. They maintain that his list was no different than that created by Oskar Schindler, for which the latter was roundly praised, and to view Szapszal in a negative light for his list is hypocritical.