Shulman was born in
Berdichev, Ukraine, (then the Russian Empire), on July 25, 1900 (although his official Russian birth certificate, presented to the family following his death, recorded his birth date as July 3, 1898), one of six children of Rachel Nemerov Shulman, who brought her six children to the United States in 1904, around the time his father Maurice (Elimelech) died, and settled in
Cleveland, Ohio. Shulman studied at
Ohio Northern University –1920 and received a
Bachelor of Law degree in 1920. and was admitted to the Ohio state ba. He attended the
University of Cincinnati 1922–23. From 1923–24, he studied at the
University of Chicago where he received his Ph.B (Bachelor of Philosophy). He received his M.A. in Comparative Religion from the same university in 1930. He studied at the
Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, from and was ordained as a
Reform rabbi in 1927. Shulman worked as a lawyer for railroad companies in the early 1920s. He was a rabbi in Johnstown, Pennsylvania (1926–27) and at Congregation Leshem Shomayim in
Wheeling, West Virginia (1927–1931). From 1931 until 1946, he was the rabbi of the North Shore Congregation Israel, Glencoe, Illinois, which he left to become the founding rabbi of Riverdale Temple, The Liberal Synagogue, in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where he presided from 1947 until his death in 1968. ==World War II==