I was born to a Jewish family in Moscow, USSR, in 1959. My father, Prof. Victor Lapidus, an engineer, came from a communist family and my mother, Dr. Henrietta Lapidus, an architect, came from a Jewish religious family. Many members of my extended family, on both the paternal and maternal sides, perished in the pogroms in the Ukraine and White Russia, in the Stalinist persecutions, and while fleeing from the Nazi army in the Second World War. In 1972 my parents applied for emigration to Israel but were refused, and spent four years as refusniks. In 1976 we came to Israel. I completed my high school education in Israel and studied for a year at the Technion in Haifa; I later studied for a year in the Neve-Jerusalem seminar for religious girls. In the years 1978-1988 I studied for BA, MA and PhD degrees, all in Jewish studies, at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.