Niggun Sung at Zayde’s Funeral

By COLlive reporter

When longtime Crown Heights resident, Reb Shimon Goldman, passed away on the 29th day of Tishrei 5777, his funeral procession traveled from the chapel in Boro Park to the Bais Rivkah school with a stop at 770 Eastern Parkway.

Students stood outside and recited Tehillim for the soul of a man who had selflessly dedicated days and nights over the years for their school. Hundreds more paid their respects outside Lubavitch Headquarters.

When he was laid to rest in the Old Montefiore Cemetery in Queens, New York, his grandchildren softly sang a Chassidic tune, an uncommon practice at funerals. His family says it was a fitting one nevertheless.

“It is originally a Yerushalmi tune,” explains Reb Moishe Klein, son-in-law of R’ Shimon and his wife Esther Goldman, about how the tune became part of the family.

“In Yerushalayim, we used to put the words of Lechah Dodi and Keil Adon to this tune,” he told the Nshei Chabad Newsletter. “Mordechai Ben David put the words of Mimkomcha to this tune. My father-in-law Reb Shimon learned it from my father, Reb Leizer Klein, a”h.”

Goldman was a Holocaust survivor who lost his entire family when he was a young boy. He ran away from home at the age of 14, soon after the Nazis invaded his home town of Shedlitz (Siedlice) in Poland in 1939.

He would be a wandering Jew for the next 6 years. Though he came from a distinguished lineage of Gerrer Chassidim, a descendant of the famed Rebbe, the Chidushei Harim, and the Yid Hakodosh, he joined the Lubavitch Yeshiva in Vilna, Lithuania.

He and his Yeshiva friends managed to obtain transit visas to Japan via the legendary life-saving diplomat Chiune Sugihara who issued thousands of visas, many against the instructions of his government in Tokyo.

They traveled across Russia to Vladivostok on the Asian side of the country. Then it was a journey by ship to Kobe, Japan, and later continued to Shanghai, China, once Japan joined the Nazis in the war.

Eventually, after the war, they received visas for America. Traveling via San Francisco and Chicago, they joined the Lubavitch Yeshiva in Brooklyn, NY, in the days of the Frierdiker Rebbe.

In 1949, he married Esther Gordon whose father, the legendary chossid Reb Yochonon Gordon, was a Shochet and the Gabbai of the Rebbe’s Shul in 770.

Reb Shimon Goldman was a qualified Rabbi and Shochet but decided to make his living as the proprietor of a kosher butchery in Brooklyn throughout his working life.

Still, he made time to be active in communal affairs, operated a big Gemilus Chesed free loan fund and served on the board of Bais Rivkah and Agudas Chassidei Chabad International, among others.

When Nshei Newsletter wrote a cover story about him for the new Shvat issue, they heard about the song that he loved and turned to one of his grandchildren to have it recorded.

“When N’shei Newsletter asked me to record this song because it is my Zayde’s favorite song, as part of its big spread on my Zayde, I was very excited at the idea,” says Shmuly Goldman, 35, of Johannesburg, South Africa.

“I loved singing with my Zayde around the Shabbos table together with my Bobbe Esther who loved listening and singing along from the kitchen,” says Goldman who served as a Chazzan in South Africa, Chicago, Cleveland, and Philadelphia.

“My Zayde Reb Shimon Goldman was one of the kindest people I knew. He cherished each and every one of us, a large family created from the ashes of the Holocaust.”

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