The Altruistic Reason a Holocaust Survivor’s Turned Down a Job

By Dovid Zaklikowski for COLlive and Hasidic Archives

For over a decade, Rabbi Yosef Goldstein had built a family, led a Jewish school and was a shochet (ritual slaughterer) in the small Polish town of Chmielnik. Then the Nazi Germans destroyed his life. His beloved wife and three children were murdered in cold blood.

Miraculously, he survived.

After the Second World War, he found himself in a Displaced Persons camp in France with nowhere to go. One of his only living relatives, his brother in Palestine, wrote to him, “Do not come to the Land of Israel… there is malaria here, and little to do for a livelihood.”

On a visit to war-torn Europe, Rabbi Eliezer Silver, President of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the U.S. and Canada (UOR) and chief rabbi of Cincinnati, Ohio, was introduced to Rabbi Goldstein.

Rabbi Silver was not happy with the state of kosher food in his hometown, and despite much controversy, had recently established his own kosher supervising agency. He was in search of a G-d-fearing ritual slaughterer, and he saw it in Rabbi Goldstein. In his late 30s already, and having remarried, Rabbi Goldstein began a new life in the United States.

In the 1950s, Rabbi Goldstein was offered a rabbinic position in Charleston, South Carolina. He was introduced to the synagogue board and congregation. Everyone was pleased with the gifted but unassuming rabbi. The position would permit his family to live with financial security in a pleasant and scenic city. It was a closed deal when the president of the synagogue offered to take the rabbi on a walking tour of the neighborhood.

As they took in the sights, an African American man walked towards them. Rabbi Goldstein moved aside to make room for him, but the man walked into the street as they passed him on the sidewalk.

“Why did he just do that?” the rabbi asked.

The president responded, “This is the South.”

Black people, he went on to explain, were expected to step off the sidewalk when passing white people. A black person, he continued, has different social rights. When conversing with a white person, a black person would have to remove their hats, and white people were not allowed to be too friendly with a person of color.

Rabbi Goldstein, who had experienced prejudice, discrimination and racism of the highest form, could not wrap his brain around such an idea.

“I survived two concentration camps, and here, in the United States, they are still acting this way?”

He walked away from the respectable position, and returned to his unassuming job as a ritual slaughterer.

 

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