-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.

Rabbi Aaron Gold, 80, has led a career more colorful and valuable than the precious metal that inspired his family name.  His life's latest episode came last Sunday, when the Israel Bonds organization presented him with a colorful lucite representation of Israel's Declaration of Independence during a luncheon at Tifereth Israel Synagogue, where he had served as a pulpit rabbi for 18 years.  The featured speaker of the afternoon was Yehuda Avner, who had served as Israel's ambassador to England and to Australia. But many of the audience came specifically to pay tribute to Gold, who has been waging a brave fight against lung cancer. So often in their times of need, Rabbi Gold had buoyed them with words of comfort and consolation; now with their standing ovation, they reciprocated. With his wife, Jeanne, at his side, Gold

Rabbi Dr. Aaron Gold.

accepted the Israel Bonds award, then used the occasion to pay tribute to his own "woman of valor." His determination to put on the record just how much his wife has meant to him made a sentimental occasion even more poignant.

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.

While Gold still was a small child, his father emigrated with an older son to Brooklyn, N.Y., where he served his Chasidic followers as a rabbi, cantor and kosher slaughterer. The father put away money from his earnings each week to pay for the rest of his family's passage to the United States.    In the meantime, members of the family in the Old Country were cared for by a wealthy friend, a man whom Aaron remembered would sweeten his Torah learning by rewarding him with candy. However sweet and however wealthy the man was, he was powerless in the face of virulent

GOLD AND PREDECESSOR -- Rabbi Monroe Levens,  right, congratulates his successor, Rabbi Aaron Gold,  during installation ceremonies in 1974.

anti-Semitism that made life in Tarnobrzeg dangerous for the Gold family. Aaron remembers that the wooden shutters of his home were always pulled shut, to protect the windows against rock throwers.
 

On one occasion, as church was letting out, young Gold's mother called to him urgently to come inside quickly. But the child was busy playing ball, and hadn't yet learned how vicious Jew-haters could be, especially after they had heard an anti-Semitic sermon. Older children beat Gold so severely he lost consciousness. After he emerged from the coma, a spot on the center of his head was so severely scarred that he thought it would remain forever bald. Another time, he dared to cut across a farmer's field on the way to the Jewish school, the cheder. The farmer set his dogs upon him, and when they had Gold down on the ground, the farmer put a pitchfork to the little boy's throat. "You little Jew-boy, you don't run!" he snarled. Thus, it was a great relief when Gold and his family received the tickets in 1928 for their passage to America aboard the American flagship Leviathan. Today, whenever Gold watches the movie, Fiddler on the Roof, and sees how the families piled their belongings high on horse-drawn carts, he remembers the scene of his own family's departure from Poland.

BEST OF LUCK -- Rabbi Aaron Gold  shakes hands on the steps of the old  Tifereth Israel Synagogue (30th and  Howard) with representative of the  church which purchased the property.

The 54,000-ton Leviathan had been built as the Vaterland by the Kaiser's government in Germany, but the ship was confiscated and taken over by the American government at the outbreak of World War I. After the war, the liner was configured to carry 3,291 passengers -- 935 of them in 4th class, or steerage. As steerage passengers, the Golds were required to pass through an inspection at Ellis Island.

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.

He was enrolled in a Yiddish-speaking cheder, but he also learned English from an American teacher he has always since remembered fondly as "Miss Chloe." Although she wore a large cross around her neck--which initially scared him because it reminded him of the hooligans who had beaten him up in Poland--Gold came to love "Miss Chloe," volunteering to carry her books to school whenever she would let him. Miss Chloe transmitted her love of the English language to Gold.

INSTALLATION OF RABBI GOLD -- Rabbi Aaron Gold  preaches a sermon at the former Tifereth Israel Synagogue  at 30th and Howard during his installation ceremonies in 1974  (Photo by Larry Okmin)

His father was another important influence on Gold, especially musically. Although the elder Gold did not know how to notate music, he was a composer of some note, and some well-known cantors, even the famous Yosele Rosenblatt, came to the Gold home to listen to the father's niggunim.

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. 

"They never will be Jews!" the father angrily replied. "They don't want to be." For Gold this exchange represented an important challenge, as well as an opportunity to reconcile two conflicting portions of his world. He had long wanted to become the friends of the very children his father was denouncing, even going to the lengths of becoming a maven on batting averages and other statistics of the three major league baseball clubs in the area: the Brooklyn Dodgers, the New York Giants and the New York Yankees.

CORNERSTONE CEREMONY -- Rabbi Aaron Gold presides  at a ceremony to lay the cornerstone of Tifereth Israel  Synagogue's new site on Cowles Mountain Boulevard in the  San Carlos area.

Anytime that a neighborhood child wanted to know something about baseball, he would go to Gold, who had become the authority by studying the sports sections of the newspapers at the corner candy store -- where out of one eye, he watched to make certain that his father would not see him engaged in such an activity.

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. 

But there would be other clashes between Gold and his father. When they would go to the barber shop, the father would stand by the barber chair, grasphing his son's payis, less the barber cut off the earlocks. On one occasion, Gold's father was distracted, and by a look, rather than a word, the barber asked Gold if he wanted the payis shorn. Yes, the young man nodded. By the time, his father's attention returned to the haircut, the payis were gone.  Gold was a good student at the Yeshiva Torah Vodaath and Mesifta Talmudic Seminary, from which he received ordination as an Orthodox rabbi while still a young teenager. Then unbeknownst to his father, Gold put himself through public high school at night, wanting to widen his knowledge of the world. Today, it's hard to imagine, but Gold was a rabbi even before he was a high school graduate.

RABBI AND BENSONS -- Rabbi Aaron Gold  hosted former Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft  Benson and his wife at Tifereth Israel Synagogue  in 1979. Benson went on to become the head of the  Church of Latter Day Saints in Salt Lake City.

If Gold's father seemed strict and unbending, his mother was gentle and tolerant. Gold's niece, Karen Roeckard, remembered that "there was an alliance between Baba (grandmother) and Uncle Aaron." Although strictly observant herself, the grandmother was tolerant of modernity.

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.

At another wedding, he recalled, there was an elderly relative who insisted on singing prior to the recitation of vows. Gold, who has the trained voice of a cantor, still wrinkles his face at the memory of the lady's screeching. The people attending the wedding started laughing--the singing was so bad--and it took all of Gold's composure to maintain a straight face. "If we could get on with the ceremony now," he said at the conclusion of one number, before the lady could start another. Mercifully, the woman sat down.

TIFERETH DEDICATION -- A joyous crowd including  Rabbi and Jeanne Gold, Mayor (and later U.S. Senator  and Gov) Pete Wilson and future state Sen. Lucy Killea  marches Torahs (under canopy in rear) to their new home  in the Cowles Mountain campus of Tifereth Israel Synagogue.

Cleveland, Ohio, and Superior, Wisconsin.

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.

Some time later, the congregation was embroiled in turmoil; its president and senior rabbi were accused of absconding with synagogue funds. Gold, meanwhile, had transferred to the pulpit of the Superior Hebrew Congregation of Superior, Wisconsin, which also was known as the "Russiche Shul" to distinguish it from Agudas Achim, known as the "Litvische Shul," located across the street. Both were Orthodox. This was the busiest of times for Gold. He and his first wife, Rita, were raising a young family. His first

TORAH DEDICATION -- Rabbi Aaron Gold joins  Charles and Ethel Silverman in admiring an ornate  Sephardic Torah case and scroll which they donated to Tifereth Israel Synagogue.

child, a son named Abraham, died during infancy. Eventually, the couple would raise four daughters: Sharon, Judi, Claudia and Dodie.

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.

So besides attending to pulpit and family, Gold also put himself through Wisconsin State College, from which he graduated with honors as an English major. On top of that, he served the community as a mohel (circumsciser), and also visited hospitals in the role of a chaplain. On one occasion, a doctor told him there was a Jewish woman in one of the hospital rooms whom he ought to visit. He knocked at her door, and she shouted from inside: "Who the hell is it?" He replied: "I am

RABIN AND GOLDS -- Yitzhak Rabin, visiting Tifereth Israel in 1980, visited with Jeanne and Rabbi Aaron Gold.

Rabbi Gold," and she said, "Oh, may God forgive me for my sins."

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 
"provocative High Holiday sermons and had a wonderful sense of humor."

Sometimes the Gold and Levick families would spend Shabbat together. 
"Saturday night we would have the havdallah service, at the end of it our kids always wanted to sing Catch a Falling Star," she recalled. 

"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. 
Many of the congregants moved from the Philadelphia neighborhood, as African-American families moved in. The Jewish families were scared by the tales that real estate agents told them that they had better sell soon before their property values dropped.

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.