In 1981, he graduated from Северо-Западный государственный заочный технический университет (North-Western Open Technical University) and defended his diploma in logic and applied mathematics in the full-time department.

In 1989, he became the organizer and rector of the Petersburg Jewish University (PJU), which revived the study and teaching of Judaica in Russia.

In 1998, he completed his postgraduate studies without defending a dissertation at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences on the topic "Hermeneutics of Maimonides".

He graduated from the Polytechnic University there, where he specialized in theoretical physics and cybernetics, but later his interests shifted towards philosophy and history, especially Jewish studies.

In the early 1980s, he began to intensively study Judaica and joined the Jewish cultural movement.

[11] From the mid-1980s, he began conducting ethnographic expeditions to study the vanished forms of Jewish life in the USSR.

From 1990 to 1998, PJU, together with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, conducted more than forty research expeditions in Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Uzbekistan, Georgia, and other countries.

During these expeditions, many of which were conducted under the direct leadership of I. Dvorkin, more than 10,000 photographs and 300 hours of audio and video recordings were collected.