[1] Rappaport was born in 1908 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, to Jewish parents from Lemberg (now Lviv, Ukraine).
Rappaport worked as screenwriter, music editor, and assistant director in Austria, Germany, and the United States from 1928 onward.
During the early 1930s he worked as an assistant to Georg Wilhelm Pabst.
Among Rappaport's best known films is an adaptation of Dmitri Shostakovich's Cheryomushki ("Cherry Town") (1963).
In 2008 the first workshow [1] was initiated outside Russia by the Austrian Filmmuseum and SYNEMA-Gesellschaft für Film und Medien, showing about half of his films.