GOLDMAN, ISRAEL

GOLDMAN, ISRAEL (1904–1979), U.S. Conservative rabbi. Born in Poland, Goldman immigrated to the United States with his parents and earned his B.A. at the City College of New York (1924) and was ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1926 where he later earned his D.H.L. (1937). While still at the Seminary, he served Temple Emmanu-El in Providence, Rhode Island, for the High Holidays and then was brought back as its full-time rabbi. He introduced many of the innovations common to the Conservative Movement of his generation, late Friday evening services and the bat mitzvah, but his primary interest was in Jewish education, at all levels. He organized a Sunday school, a pta, and an innovative adult education program that enrolled 350 students in 1941 alone. His local success with adult Jewish education brought him national attention and he proposed and directed the National Academy for Adult Jewish Studies, created under the auspices of the Seminary. It published books and created adult institutes called Kallot. Goldman was president of the *Rabbinical Assembly from 1946 to 1948 where he tried to create a regional structure for the rabbinic organization and also for its international expansion. He also pushed the Rabbinical Assembly into social action by forming the Social Justice Commission. "Going national" was not without its tensions with his Providence congregation. Goldman resolved them by leaving in 1948 and moving to Baltimore, where he took Chizuk Amuno congregation and moved it to the nearby suburb of Pikesville. With suburbanization came a threefold growth in membership. Goldman was a leader in the civil rights movement and served as vice chairman of the Maryland Commission on Interracial Relations. He received significant support for his civil rights efforts from his congregation. In 1963 he was arrested in a protest against segregation, a mark of honor in his career.

He was the author of two books The Life and Times of Rabbi David ibn Abi Zimra (1970), a book about Jewish life in the post-Spanish expulsion Ottoman Empire, and Lifelong Learning among Jews: Adult Education in Judaism from Biblical Times to the 20^th Century (1975).

bibliography:

P.S. Nadell, Conservative Judaism in America: A Biographical Dictonary and Sourcebook (1988).

[Michael Berenbaum (2^nd ed.)]