As the Nazis began exterminating the Ghetto in late 1942, sending inmates to the Treblinka death camp, all three were able to escape to the Christian side and remain in hiding.

Hershaft began his science career at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, where he taught graduate classes in X-ray crystallography.

In 1967, Hershaft joined the Grumman Aerospace Corporation in Bethpage, New York, to review potential areas of new business in air and water pollution control, and solid waste management.

He joined the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton in Bethesda, Maryland, to evaluate water management alternatives, impacts of electric power plants and transmission lines, and costs and benefit of data from the Earth Resources Technology Satellite.

He studied emissions from various heating fuels and prepared protocols for assessing and cleaning up hazardous waste sites as part of the U.S. Superfund program.

In November 1961, while working at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Hershaft staged a major demonstration in Tel-Aviv, leading to the formation of the League for Abolition of Religious Coercion in Israel, a massive movement seeking to end repression of secular, Reform, and Conservative Judaism, as well as mixed marriages, by entrenched Orthodox authorities.

[12] Accordingly, in the summer of 1981, Hershaft organized Action For Life, a national conference at Cedar Crest College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, that effectively launched the U.S. animal rights movement.

Participants included such animal rights pioneers as Cleveland Amory, Ingrid Newkirk, Alex Pacheco, Peter Singer, Henry Spira, Gretchen Wyler, as well as radio host Thom Hartmann.

These conferences continued for seven more years in San Francisco (1982), Montclair, New Jersey (1983), Los Angeles (1985), Chicago (1986), Cambridge, Massachusetts (1987), and Washington (1984 and 1991).

At the national animal rights conferences, he lectures on personal growth, leadership, social change, campaign strategies, and movement building.

Their daughter, Monica Larissa Hershaft, was born in 1966 and after recovering from a ten-year-long illness which she attributes to a vegan diet,[23] she opened a holistic health and nutrition wellness center in Los Angeles in 2008.

He has been physically active throughout his life, mostly by playing soccer on various school and county teams, running marathons in the early 1980s, and more recently, by engaging in weekly folk dancing and swimming.