 He graduated in 1927 from the Russian Academy of Arts there.In the 1930s he became associated with a group of artists and lithographers in Leningrad which had been instructed to prepare a series of works dedicated to the remote Jewish Autonomous Oblast, being created by Joseph Stalin in the hope of resettling Russia's Jewish population in a remote area in the Far East of the country.Here Kaplan learnt and took to the skills of printmaking, developing many individual techniques.