2001-04-06: Aaron Gold |
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By
Donald H. Harrison
-First in a series- San Diego (special) --Just to clear up the historical record, Gold was found not only in California, but in Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio and New York -- and in a small village in Poland too.
Aaron Shalom Gold was born May 13, 1920, in the village of Tarnobrzeg, Poland, the son of Elazar Elimelech Gold and Zlata Miril Gold. The product of his father's second marriage, he was the 10th of his father's 11 children, and the 7th of his mother's eight.
Gold's father was waiting for his family. When an inspector asked the elder Gold in English whether these were members of his family, he didn't understand them. "He didn't speak English: he thought it was traif (not kosher)," Aaron later would recall. A Yiddish-speaking interpreter stepped in and translated, "Is this your wife?" he asked. "Is he meshuganah (crazy)?" the elder Gold demanded indignantly. "Does he think I'd be here for a strange woman?" Growing up in Brooklyn Young Gold, who didn't speak English either, was disappointed by the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.. He had thought the New World would be "filled with towers reaching to the sky." Instead, he mostly saw squat apartment buildings.
While mostly Jewish families lived in his neighborhood, not all of them were so religiously inclined as the Golds. One day, as Gold was accompanying his father home from synagogue, they came across a group of neighborhood boys playing baseball. "Shabbos! Shabbos! " screamed the father at the children. To his son, he later commented scornfully that these children were no Jews at all. Gold remonstrated with his father. Yes, Papa, he told him, they are Jews; they simply don't have the training and the knowledge of Judaism that had been available to the Gold children.
Eventually, young Gold set up the Ashford Street Junior Congregation for the youngsters, at times attracting several hundred to separate worship services. This earned him the moniker, "Areleh the Wunderkind." He even was the subject of a feature story in the local Yiddish-language newspaper.
From his days as a young rabbi (and high school student), Gold particularly remembers one story about the time an older rabbi asked him to stand in for him at a wedding ceremony near the Hudson River. The neophyte rabbi purchased a train ticket at his own expense, only to arrive upon a scene that was in full confusion. The mother of the bride was screaming at someone, "You sat my uncle with your aunt, are you serious?" and the argument escalated from there. The mother snatched her daughter, the bride, and stormed out of the wedding, never to return. Not only didn't Gold receive a fee, he wasn't even reimbursed for the ticket.
Such early lessons did not prepare Gold for the challenges of his first pulpit, a small Orthodox congregation in Cleveland, Ohio, the name of which Gold forgets--either because of failing memory or out of a sense of kindness. To his horror, Gold learned that every Saturday following Shabbos services, members of the congregation would retire to another room and start their weekly poker and bingo games. When he protested that gambling violated Shabbos, his trial period as an assistant rabbi was over. He was dismissed from the post.
Conservative Rabbi David Aronson, longtime rabbi of Congregation Beth El in Minneapolis, attended one of Gold's services at the Superior Hebrew Congregation. He commented to Gold afterwards that with the all the English he had incorporated into the service, the format really was more Conservative than Orthodox. If Gold would get himself a college degree, Aronson said, he would sponsor the young Orthodox rabbi for membership in the Rabbinical Assembly of the Conservative movement. "He was my mentor," said Gold of Aronson, who had served as president of the Rabbinical Assembly in 1944 and 1945.
He found a large woman inside, attended by a servant, who immediately told him her Hebrew name, and all about how religious her father had been. As Gold listened, a look of realization came over the woman's face: "Rabbi, you don't know who I am, do you?" "No," he admitted, he didn't. "I'm Black Sadie," she said. She was the notorious madam of the best known brothel in Superior, a Navy town on the Great Lake. "Bring me my cigar box!" she commanded her servant. Gold thought that she intended to smoke, but instead she pulled from the box a big roll of money, and began peeling off currency. "I want to make a donation to the synagogue," she said. "Well, er, I..." Gold stammered, not certain if he should accept any such ill-gotten gains for the synagogue. "Don't worry, rabbi," she said, understanding his hesitation. "A lot of your congregants contributed to this!" When Gold graduated from Wisconsin State College, his diploma reflected his love of English literature. Instead of Aaron Shalom Gold, it identified him as Aaron Shelley Gold--after the English poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was his favorite. Back to New York In 1952, the Gold family moved back to New York, where he could work for a master's degree in education and a double doctorate in education and in marriage and family counseling from Columbia University. Continuing the pattern he established in Superior, he coupled his studies with work as a rabbi. He landed a pulpit at Temple Israel, a Conservative congregation in Riverhead, N.Y. Corky Segal, a congregant, remembered Gold's five-year tenure fondly -- especially that the pulpit rabbi also had been trained as a mohel.. As Riverhead was approximately a two-hour drive east of New York City, on Long Island, if Gold hadn't been so trained, a mohel would have had to be brought in from New York City to conduct the brit milah ceremony for her son. Segal also recalled that Gold loved to dress up in costume for Purim. One year he donned his mother's sheidel and stuffed his shirt "in the appropriate places" to portray a woman of Queen Esther's time, Segal said. One of the youngsters at Temple Israel during Gold's tenure was Elaine Shackman, today Elaine Kimpel, who recalled that the rabbi "sang beautifully, had a choir, and a wonderful sense of humor. He made a mark on the community." After Kimpel became a bat mitzvah, she taught in the Hebrew school at Temple Israel. One Friday night, Gold had to be out of town. "He asked me to lead the Friday night service... I remember that so distinctly, how thrilled I was. I was probably the first woman in the congregation to do so. He empowered me tremendously in a time before it was common." Kimpel went on to become a teacher in the public schools, and recalls Gold fondly for begin "a major influence in terms of yiddishkeit, in terms of being a teacher .... " Additionally, "he sang so beautifully, took such joy in music and Yiddishkeit.; it clicked with me." On days that Gold attended classes at Columbia University, he stayed in an apartment with his sister, Blanche Katz, who lived close to the campus. Blanche's son, Danny, often would go with Gold to the Thalia movie theatre, where they would watch foreign films together. Gold still is a film buff. On one occasion, Gold was commuting to his sister Blanche's apartment on the icy expressway in a little two-seater car, a Morris Minor, when a truck struck him and the Morris Minor "spun like a dreidel, out of control" before coming to rest. Gold, with relief, counted all his fingers and toes; they were still there. But the force of the collision cracked his shoulder blade. During the Riverhead period, Gold also served as a chaplain at two local Air Force bases, as well as the Brookhaven National Laboratories, where medical researchers and clergy collaborated together in the treatment and counseling of terminal cancer patients. Ministers of other faiths, impressed by Gold's doctoral credentials from Columbia, asked that he counsel them too. Gold said nothing was more heartbreaking than working with a terminally-ill child and family. Pennsylvania After completing his studies at Columbia, Gold accepted a pulpit in 1957 at the Mt. Airy Jewish Community Center in Philadelphia, another Conservative congregation. Although he had been happy at Temple Israel, he and Rita wanted their children to attend a Jewish day school, of which there were none in remote Riverhead, N.Y. In Philadelphia, the children could receive a Jewish education and remain close to home. Dr. Myra Levick, who now lives with her husband in Boca Raton, Fla.,
was a Sisterhood officer during Gold's tenure at Mt. Airy. She remembered
him as a "wonderful rabbi," whose Friday night sermons often dealt with
current political topics "in an objective sort of way." She said he also
delivered
Sometimes the Gold and Levick families would spend Shabbat together.
"When their youngest daughter was born, they stayed with us ... We had a poodle and the poodle was so jealous of Dodie. We'd all crowd around the new baby." The friendship persists to this day: "He officiated at our 50th wedding anniversary," Dr. Levick said. "He married two of the children..." At one of those marriage ceremonies, Gold gave advice to the newlyweds that so struck Dr. Levick that she wrote it down. "A diamond is an ordinary piece of coal that stuck to its job," he advised the newlywed couple. "Stick to the job of caring, sharing, sacrificing, nourishing, and your marriage will be a precious, glittering diamond that will illuminate your lives. If you do this, you will be a source of nachas and joy to each other and to all who know you and love you." Today the Mt. Airy Jewish Community Center no longer exists. The neighborhood
changed, and today the building houses a Baptist Church.
Gold attended numerous community meetings, attempting to stem the tide of "white flight." But he was unsuccessful. After seven years service in Philadelphia, he accepted a pulpit in 1964 at Temple Beth Sholom, in Las Vegas, Nev. At the time, it was the only synagogue in Las Vegas. Next: Gold in the west. |