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Nahum goldmann biography

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This week in Jewish history | WJC co-founder, President Nahum Goldmann passes away

On 29 August 1982, co-founder and president of the World Jewish Congress Nahum Goldmannpassed away in Bad Reichenhall, Germany at the age of 87. 

Nahum Goldmann was born into an ardent Zionist family in the Russian Empire, in what is today Belarus. In fact, in his autobiography, Goldmann wrote, ''I can hardly say when I became a Zionist. Even as a child I was a Zionist without knowing it, inasmuch as I took over my father’s concepts and his positive attitude to everything Jewish as axioms of my heritage.” 

At the age of six, Goldmann moved with his parents to Frankfurt. In 1911, while still in high school, he and his father attended the Tenth Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. In 1913, he visited Palestine for four months, eventually publishing his impressions of the adventure in his book Eretz Israel: Travel letters from Palestine at the age of 18.  

After he was stripped of his German citizenship in 1935, Goldmann became a citizen of Honduras. He was a vocal and ardent supporter of the i

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Nahum Goldmann

Nahum Goldmann was born in Lithuania and grew up in Germany in an identified Jewish home. He was educated at German universities where he studied philosophy and law. From an early age he became strongly allied with Zionist thought, and during World War I, while working at the Jewish division of the German Foreign Ministry, he attempted to enlist the Kaiser's support for the Zionist idea.

In the 1920s, Goldmann was involved in publishing a Zionist periodical and also in launching the project of a German Jewish encyclopedia. In all, twelve volumes of the encyclopedia, ten in German and two in Hebrew, appeared before the Nazi rise to power halted the project. Retaining the idea, Goldmann was a crucial figure in the 1960s behind the English language Encyclopedia Judaica.

Goldmann was involved in a range of Zionist causes during the Mandate periodMandate period, Goldmann was involved in a range of Zionist causes, including negotiations with the British, aimed at realizing the idea of Jewish statehood. In particular, he supported the partition of Palestine, arg

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Nahum Goldmann

Statesman without a State

Alternative formats available from:

Preface
Mark A. Raider
Part I. Statesman

1. Nahum Goldmann:Jewish and Zionist Statesman
Jehuda Reinharz and Evyatar Friesel
Part II. Thinker
2. Nahum Goldmann as Zionist Thinker
Gideon Shimoni
3. Negation of the Galut and the Centrality of Israel: Nahum Goldmann and David Ben Gurion
Yosef Gorny
Part III. Maverick
4. The German Years:Early Chapters in the Biography of a Jewish Statesman
Michael Brenner
5. Nahum Goldmann and The First Two Decades of the World Jewish Congress
Zohar Segev
6. Nahum Goldmann and Chaim Weizmann: An Ambivalent “Relationship”
Jehuda Reinharz
7. Idealism, Vision, and Pragmatism:Stephen S. Wise, Nahum Goldmann, and Abba Hillel Silver in the United States
Mark A. Raider
8. Toward the Partition of Palestine:The Goldmann Mission in Washington, August 1946
Evyatar Friesel
Part IV. Leader

9. Nahum Goldmann and Germany after World War II
Shlomo Shafir
10. “Reparations Made Me”:Nahum Goldmann, German Reparations, and the Jewish Worl

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