Remembering Rabbi Avi Goldberg
Program in Teaneck will help his community in Jerusalem
Rabbi Avi Goldberg was an extraordinary man. It is not hagiographic to say that.
His death was a huge loss not only to his family and friends, but to the whole world. It is not an exaggeration to say that.
His community, in south Jerusalem, also is extraordinary — thanks in large part to him, but not only to him — and the reaction of his family, friends, and community to the hole left by his absence. Their determination to fill that hole with love, hope, and connection, is in itself an act of hope.
His widow, Rachel Goldberg, and a community member, Rachel Sharansky Danziger, will come to Teaneck next weekend to talk about Rabbi Goldberg and to raise awareness and funds for their community, BeOrcha. (See box.)
Separately, from their homes in south Jerusalem, each talked about Rabbi Goldberg and about BeOrcha. As Ms. Sharansky Danzinger put it, the two stories converge. But let’s start with Rabbi Goldberg.
First, his death, although that should not be the first fact anyone knows about him. But it is typical of him — he was the first Israeli chaplain killed on active duty since the Yom Kippur war. Not only was he a reservist, not only did he go with his unit so he could help them from the sidelines, he was an active warrior, and he died in service, in Lebanon, on October 26, 2024.
Ms. Goldberg’s English is fluid and entirely unaccented — that can be misleading, she said, because her vocabulary isn’t always as large as her accent implies it should be. She was born in Israel to American parents who made aliyah in 1971; she’s one of eight children and was born in 1973. She’s a musician and a nurse, and she’s studying to become a midwife.
Her voice is steady but the emotion is clear as she talks about her husband.
He “had an immense Torah, that he shared in the ways that everyone — very learned people, very deep and spiritual and wise people, and people who were chiloni” — secular people — “could understand, because he was connected to deep truth and deep positivity, and he wanted to bring this Torah chayim” — this living Torah — “to the world,” she said.
He was a loving, deeply involved father of eight children, ranging in age from 20 to 4, but — and — he also did so much, in so many places, that it seems that somehow he overcame the laws of physics. He was an educator who worked in a high school. “We are both musicians — he played the clarinet, and I play the violin, and six or seven of our children already play.
“We play Jewish music and Israeli music. All kinds of Jewish music — Carlebach, Naomi Shemer, newer musicians, a lot of different musicians. We’d have a melave Malka, and have 80, 90, 100 people in our house.” How big is your house, Ms. Goldberg? “It’s what Americans would consider a normal house, but for Israel, it’s big,” she said.
“He officiated at chiloni weddings,” she continued. That came about naturally. “He was the leader of Yom Kippur davening at Kibbutz Ginosar. It’s a chiloni kibbutz, but 20 years ago they had an initiative to have a minyan for Yom Kippur. So they got my husband, and all those years he did that.” It took a great deal of organizing — there were men on the kibbutz who grew up dati — religiously observant — and knew how to daven, and there were girls on the women’s side who could help out the new daveners. There were many logistics involved, but they were overcome.
“My husband had a deep understanding of people’s needs, and of their yearning. He would give them the kavannah, the taste, the essence of the day, whether it was Megillat Yonah” — the Book of Jonah, which is read on Yom Kippur afternoon — “or any part of the tefillah, or anything else.”
The two of them also spent three years in Memphis, Tennessee, as shlichim, emissaries from Israel.
“And this was aside from his daily job, which was to be mechanech,” a teacher, but more than just a teacher, the “main teacher for limudei kodesh,” the most deeply Jewish part of the high school education. “He was the rabbi of the high school, in charge of volunteers for 10th and 11th grade, and in charge of their chesed programs.” Instead of taking his students to places like old age homes and returning to pick them up, as is the custom, “he would also go.” He modeled acts of chesed for his students, because he so deeply meant them for himself, Ms. Goldberg said.
“He was like a psychologist for the students and their parents,” she continued. “He had a very deep understanding of how to empower them, to show them how to contribute to the world.” But he wasn’t serious all the time. Joy was no stranger to him. “He would play basketball with his students, and he had an amazing sense of humor.”
How did he manage to do all this? “I don’t know to explain it,” his widow said. “People said that he had more than 24 hours to each day. We were married for 21 years, and my whole house is full of pictures. His way of being a spouse and a father was as if he had it in his veins. And his lev” — his heart — “and his neshama” — his soul — “and his chochma” — his wisdom — “was to empower more and more Torah.”
During the year before October 7, when Israelis protested the proposed judicial reform, and massive numbers of people took to the streets every Saturday night, Israeli society became more and more divided. The Goldbergs did not think that the tension separating Israelis from each other was healthy, so “we hosted 15 or 20 people in our living room, often, so it was intimate, and people could speak to each other.
“Avi was the best listener. He would listen to people of different political views, without ever losing his own views. He touched people with very, very strong left-wing opinions — it’s not as if we are so right wing. We are very serious on our Torah, and in what we believe medinat Israel could and should and will be.
“It could and should and will be a place that brings light. We can bring more light than other nations can, because we have the Torah. We have something to give to the world. America brings some things to the world, but it doesn’t have the values that the Torah gives us as a society, with justice and chesed and yosher — integrity. That means that Am Israel has meaning, and Avi brought that meaning through his love for Am Israel, and his love of Torah, and his spirit, and his Emunah, his faith, and his positivity.”
Once the war in Gaza started, Rabbi Goldberg went with his unit. “I didn’t have him in the house for 250 days,” Ms. Goldberg said. He didn’t have to do it — he was 43 years old, and he had eight children. That meant that he was exempt from being called up. “But he felt that he could still contribute,” she said. He was among his men, giving them wisdom and encouragement and heart and hope and love, until he died.
His shiva was extraordinary, Ms. Goldberg said. “There were 1,000 people on motzei Shabbat. There were three tents, in a big parking lot under our home, and people were just drawn there. More than 600 people showed up on Friday night.
“His ruach” — his spirit – “was there,” she continued. “There was music, deep songs, songs that are tefillah. We could feel him there, and people came again and again, for more ruach.”
Rabbi Goldberg was a man of unusual gifts, Ms. Sharansky Danzinger agreed. “Rav Avi had the ability to lift someone’s spirits with a smile. With a glance. He was able to make people feel seen and loved.
“It’s hard to speak of him apart from Rachel. They were such a unit. Avi and Rachel. Rachel and Avi. I keep looking for him in the street. The one time it is clear to me that he is gone is when I look at Rachel. She has changed, and the change in her speaks of loss. She has become fiercer, she’s stronger, she’s more outspoken.
“When I look at her and he’s not there beside her, then I fully accept that he’s gone.”
The second stream that converged in this story, and that brings Ms. Goldberg and Ms. Sharansky Danzinger to New Jersey, is the community that the Goldbergs helped found that Ms. Sharansky Danzinger and her husband, Micha Danzinger, joined about three and a half years ago.
That second narrative is the story of that community, BeOrcha, and its goal, to build itself a home.
BeOrcha — which means In Your Light — was begun 16 years ago by Rav David Ansbacher and his wife, Nomi, who is Rachel Goldberg’s sister,” Ms. Sharansky Danziger said. “It grew and grew and grew. Before covid, it used to daven in a room in one of the neighborhood schools. During covid, it started davening outside, and it doubled and quadrupled in size, so that when covid ended, we couldn’t fit in any of those rooms again.
“You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”
Nor did they want to. The community members loved what they’d created, and they wanted to offer it to more and more people.
Ms. Sharansky Danziger tried to explain its appeal. “The community is unique in that it is a real community,” she said. “I know that for an American Jew, that doesn’t sound like much.” Because there are so many shuls in Israel, and because the financial structure means that there’s no dues-based membership, religious life there is different. “I lived in Boston for three years, and that’s where I discovered the power of community, and how being seen in your community can transform your life.
“That’s not as common in Israel. But BeOrcha is a real community. We see each other, we celebrate and mourn together. We raise our children together. That’s what attracted us. My husband went there almost by chance, for the High Holy Days, during covid, and then he didn’t want to leave.
“We felt that it gave us all the chance to see and be loved and to grow and to contribute.
“Over the years, we’ve done much programming that’s aimed inward; there’s always a weekly oneg or melave malka. But the programming started to turn more outward during the war. We used some of the same programming, the human resources we have to share with the people around us.
“There’s a wide age distribution in the community, but most of us are relatively young — middle aged or younger — and that meant that almost all the men in the community were reservists and were called up. Early in the war, we were supporting a few dozen families in the community — I don’t know for sure how many families we have, but I am sure that it’s over 100 who are very involved — and we knew that the wives in those families were alone and struggling.
“So we were dealing with supporting those families for the first few months of the war, and we were hitting the limits of what we could do. Nomi was talking with the women regularly — not just helping with cooking and making babysitting arrangements, but really talking — and she knew how hard it was.”
No one had any idea how long the war would last. “Back then, three months seemed unimaginable. People were hitting their limits; how straight they could keep their backs, how big a smile they could keep on their faces. The soldiers were hitting their limits. Nomi and Rav David noticed that part of the difficulty for soldiers on the front because they felt their families were collapsing.”
They realized that they had to do something. “They started wondering what they could do for reservists’ families. They started a program called Miluim, which partnered communities abroad, in the U.S. and England and other countries, with families here. They would adopt a family and send a weekday meal once a week.” That’s because families were getting help on Shabbat, but there is an entire work and school week to be confronted and overcome between every Shabbat.
As the community’s goals and desire to help continued to expand, its need for a building became more acute. “We used to meet in people’s homes, and particularly in the Goldbergs’ house,” Ms. Sharansky Danziger said. “We used a neighborhood community center. But we were reaching the limits of what we could do.”
So the need to remember Avi Goldberg with a living memorial rather than an inert monument, and his community’s desire to grow and spread its message of hope and love intersect.
“We want to have programs to help build family resilience,” Ms. Sharansky Goldberg said. “It has been a challenge because different family members experience the war differently. The soldiers on the front lines and the mothers holding the family together and the children all feel different things, and we want to have programs to help them understand each other. We want to offer Torah learning to both the religious community in south Jerusalem and to the general public, to anyone who wants to learn. To anyone who wants to be part of the discussion.
“We want to be able to take the feeling of community that we have and harness it and scale it up so that people who come to us feel welcomed, included, and embraced. To feel the same thing that I was lucky to feel three and a half years ago.”
Ms. Sharansky Danziger is a teacher and a gifted writer whose blog posts are featured in the Times of Israel. She’s the daughter of the refusnik Natan Sharansky, whose courage, resilience, and charisma propelled him into a political career in Israel once he finally was allowed to take that swerving walk out of the Soviet Union. Her mother, Avital Sharansky, also a refusnik, was similarly a model of heroism, belief, steadfastness, and honor.
Having parents like those, “growing up the way I did, means that I grew up with a very strong sense that we live for more than ourselves,” she said. “We live for Am Yisrael. That was in the food we ate and the air we breathed. That is a big part of how I view life, and it is a big part of why I love Kehilla BeOrcha. I meet like-minded people there.
“Another thing that’s relevant for these days is that growing up in the wake of the victory of the struggle for Soviet Jewry, surrounded by veterans of that struggle, I grew up with the absolute certainty that we as the Jewish people can achieve anything if we work together. So even now, when we fight each other, I look at it and see that this is surface level. I know that I wouldn’t even exist without the Jewish people. I know that we have it in us to come together. We just have to tap into it somehow.”
Rabbi Jacob J. Schacter of Teaneck, who is the University Professor of Jewish history and Jewish thought and senior scholar at the Center for the Jewish Future at Yeshiva University, and also a member of Rinat Yisrael, is overseeing the program in Teaneck.
“Both my wife, Yocheved, and I have been extraordinarily inspired by Rachel Goldberg and her late husband, and we felt motivated to try to help her and her community,” he said. “We want to help develop this center for hope and inspiration in memory of her husband.
“The goal here is to reach out to a broad spectrum of Israeli society, to bring them together to express unity through music, and through personal engagement with people with whom we disagree. It’s to lower the tension and create a place that will exude warmth, goodness, peace, meaning, optimism, and hope.
The two Rachels will speak on Friday night at Rinat, he said, and the community is invited. On Saturday night, after Shabbat, a program at Congregation Keter Torah in Teaneck will include music; the musician Jonathan Rimberg, who also lives in Teaneck, will perform. “He’s really magnificent,” Rabbi Schacter said. It will start at 8:30, which means that people from MetroWest will have enough time to get there after Shabbat ends, and they are most welcome to do so.
Rabbi Schacter hopes that Ms. Goldberg’s sister, Nomi Ansbacher, will be able to join the other two women. It’s likely that she can, he said. There also will be parlor meetings with people who are interested in supporting the project financially; such support is necessary for it to move forward.
Although hope cannot replace grief, remembering someone who lived for love and Torah and music and joy is a good way to ensure that at least hope and grief can coexist.
What: A weekend remembering Rabbi Avi Goldberg
When: March 7-8
Where: At Rinat Yisrael on Friday night, and at Keter Torah on Saturday night
To learn more or to donate: Email Rabbi J.J. Schacter at jacobjschacter@gmail.com
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