Located in the southern Shephelah between Kiryat Malakhi and Ashkelon, it falls under the jurisdiction of Shafir Regional Council.

[1] The village was founded in the beginning of the 1950s as the Shafir Regional Center, a group of regional educational facilities on land belonging to the depopulated Palestinian village of Al-Sawafir al-Gharbiyya.

[2][3] In 1958, it was merged with the farm Dganim, which was abandoned due to failure.

In October 1957, The name was changed to Merkaz Shapira in honor of Knesset member Haim-Moshe Shapira, who was wounded in a grenade attack,[4] but due to legal problems, it was only changed officially in 1970.

[5] Merkaz Shapira contains the Or Etzion yeshiva which consists of both a high school and post-high school religious learning institutions (on its eastern end) and an elementary and middle school for itself and nearby villages (Azrikam, Ein Tzurim, Masu'ot Yitzhak, Shafir, Shtulim and Zerahia).