Ben-Zion Gold ( – April 18, 2016) was an American
rabbi
A rabbi () is a spiritual leader or religious teacher in Judaism. One becomes a rabbi by being ordained by another rabbi – known as ''semikha'' – following a course of study of Jewish history and texts such as the Talmud. The basic form of ...
who was the Rabbi of the
Hillel at
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...
from 1958 until he became Rabbi Emeritus in 1990. Gold was born in 1923 in
Radom
Radom is a city in east-central Poland, located approximately south of the capital, Warsaw. It is situated on the Mleczna River in the Masovian Voivodeship (since 1999), having previously been the seat of a separate Radom Voivodeship (1975†...
, Poland, and is the only member of his family to have survived
the Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ...
. He immigrated to the United States in 1947. He was a graduate of the
Jewish Theological Seminary.
Rabbi Gold's memoir of his childhood in pre-war Poland was widely admired.
[A Sad, Searching Soul, Reading Ben-Zion Gold’s achingly sad, uncommonly beautiful memoir of life in prewar Poland, By Allan Nadler, Forward, April 10, 200]
/ref>
Books
* ''Tradition and Contemporary Reality (sermons and speeches)'', Puritan Press (Cambridge, MA), 1990
* ''The Life of Jews in Poland before the Holocaust: A Memoir by Ben-Zion Gold'', University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 2007
* ''Cisza przed burzą. Życie polskich Żydów przed Holokaustem'' (Polish edition), wyd. Austeria, Kraków - Budapeszt, 2011
References
1920s births
2016 deaths
20th-century Polish Jews
People from Radom
Jewish Theological Seminary of America alumni
Harvard University people
Rabbis from Massachusetts
Polish memoirists
Polish emigrants to the United States
21st-century American rabbis
{{US-rabbi-stub