Ben-Zion Gold: 26 July 1923-20 April 2016

Ben-Zion Gold, a long-time member of the Board of the American Association of Polish Jewish Studies who died on 20 April 2016, was director of Harvard Hillel from 1958 until he retired in 1990. He grew up in a traditional religious Jewish family in Radom in central Poland and described his childhood in a beautifully written and moving memoir, The Life of Jews in Poland before the Holocaust (2007) which was translated into Polish as Cisza przed burzą: Życie polskich Żydów przed Holokaustem (2011). In it he related his experiences as a student in a number of yeshivas, most notably in the preparatory programme of the Yeshiva Hakhmei Lublin which had opened just a few years earlier in 1930 in the imposing building which still stands and has been returned to the Jewish community of Poland. His parents, three sisters, and brother were murdered in the Holocaust. Ben-Zion attributed his survival to his religious faith and claimed that his experiences in German concentration camps 'deepened [his] attachment to Judaism [and] strengthened [him] in [his] devotion to [his] heritage'. But he was also well aware that the world of unquestioning faith in which he had been brought up could not be recreated after the Nazis' devastating revelation of what humanity was capable of. As he put it:

Sometimes when I visit Meah Shearim, the quarter of ultra Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem, I feel as though I had returned to the scenes of my childhood. Many things about them are reminiscent of the life of religious Jews in Poland: they speak Yiddish, their children go to ḥeder and yeshiva the way I did, even the foods served in their restaurants are similar. But it is only an illusion. For all of the similarity in language and way of life there is a significant difference. The resemblance is like that of a sect that is dedicated to the preservation of a way of life that no longer exists.

Throughout his life he continued, in his words, to wrestle with these 'problems of faith' but also attempted to remain true to 'the Jewish tradition in which [he] had grown up at home, studied in ḥeder, and at the yeshiva'. It was this twin vision which made him such an exceptional individual and explains the devotion which he aroused among so many students, colleagues, and friends, above all those in the 'worship and study' minyan which he created.

After liberation he found himself in the Feldafing displaced persons camp, where he learned the details of his entire family's destruction, and in 1947 he emigrated to the United States. In spite of the crisis of faith caused by this tragedy, he decided to enrol in the rabbinical school of the Jewish Theological Seminary. As he wrote: 'Once the certainty of knowing the ways of God was gone, I had to live with imponderables and paradoxes, with more questions than answers. Eventually I understood that questions, no matter how many and how cogent, are only questions. It is our impatience that turns them into answers.' He knew from the inside the world of traditional Jewish belief and observance as it had developed in the east European Jewish heartland, but was able to look back at it from the new perspective of a regained but transformed faith. As a Hillel rabbi, he lovingly evoked this destroyed world and attempted to convey its deep spirituality, while distancing himself from its fundamentalism and ethnic self-centredness.

The central theme of his life was his recovery of faith in a new and contemporary form. He thus did not discuss either in his memoir (apart from a single chapter briefly describing the last days before his liberation) or in his interaction with others his experiences in the Nazi camps. This central episode of his life functioned as a void—the void that destroyed his original understanding of faith—and its absence spoke much louder than any description, no matter how moving, of the horrors of camp life. Ben-Zion's life was thus an uplifting account of the resilience...