Bernard Avishai recently found and shared a video interview he had conducted of Rabbi Gold in 2001. Bernard Avishai teaches political economy at Dartmouth and is a scholar, author, and a writer for the New Yorker magazine. He was a “regular” at the Worship and Study Minyan from 1981, where he admired, and befriended, Rabbi…
The rough, unfinished draft of a 1995 essay titled “What I Learned as a Rabbi,” was found by Rabbi Gold’s daughter after his death. In this essay, Ben-Zion describes his impressions of American Conservative synagogue worship in relation to traditional synagogues of his youth in pre-War Poland, where worshipers were knowledgeable about Jewish tradition and…
From friends and colleagues: After Rabbi Gold died, his Worship and Study Congregation at Harvard Hillel requested that congregants and friends share remembrances of him. Here are just a small sample: Sam Fuchs I joined Worship and Study and met Ben after he had retired from Harvard Hillel, and so could only listen with wonder,…
In his decades of serving as a rabbi at Harvard Hillel, Ben-Zion Gold officiated at many weddings. One of the earliest was the wedding of Hans Herda and Phyllis Goldman on July 4, 1962. As of the date of this blog post, Hans and Phyllis have been married 56 1/2 years. Hans explained the photo…
