Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein (1890–1970)—The Maverick Rabbi

From left: Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein’s father-in-law, philanthropist Harry Fischel; Rabbi Goldstein; Rabbi Goldstein’s son-in-law and synagogue successor, Rabbi Dr. O. Asher Reichel, shown here in Rabbi Goldstein’s office at the Institutional Synagogue. Courtesy of Rabbi Aaron I. Reichel

It is hard to fathom an Orthodox Union without OU Kosher, without a Women’s Branch (now the OU Women’s Initiative), without an NCSY for high school students or a Yavneh (now the Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus) for college students, and without so many of the other initiatives that shape Orthodox Jewish life today.

But this was the landscape in the early 1920s, when Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein emerged as a national Orthodox leader more than a century ago. Much of what we now take for granted in American Orthodoxy was still in its infancy. There were a handful of day schools or yeshivot, no five-day workweek, and few kosher-certified products in supermarkets. Preaching a sermon in unaccented English was virtually unheard of.

All of this made Rabbi Goldstein—the first American-born, Ivy League–educated Orthodox rabbi to achieve national prominence—unique in the American Orthodox Jewish landscape and a driving force in transforming Orthodoxy in the early part of the twentieth century.

Rabbi Goldstein received semichah from the rabbi then heading the Agudath Harabbonim, Rabbi Sholom Elchanan Jaffe, who served as the spiritual leader of Manhattan’s Beth Hamidrash Hagadol, the preeminent synagogue of Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Orthodox immigrants.

To hone his skills in the specifically American aspects of the contemporary rabbinate, Rabbi Goldstein earned a second ordination at the Jewish Theological Seminary (when it was still traditional enough to have been considered worthy of a merger with Yeshiva University’s rabbinical school). He followed this by earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Columbia University. He was accepted into Columbia Law School but ultimately decided that American Jewry did not need another Jewish lawyer and that he could make a greater difference as a rabbi. The decision shaped not only his own life but, to a great extent, Orthodox Jewish life in America.

Rabbi Goldstein was selected to succeed the then-Orthodox Mordecai Kaplan—who later became the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism—as the English-speaking rabbi of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun (KJ) in 1913, alongside the venerable Rabbi Moses Zevulun Margolies (Ramaz). This was his first rabbinical position.

In addition to becoming the first director of KJ’s Central Jewish Institute, his responsibilities included delivering sermons in English each Shabbat while the senior rabbi spoke in Yiddish. The arrangement reflected the passing of the baton from the immigrant generation to their more Americanized sons and daughters.

Rabbi Goldstein soon became convinced that the Orthodox community needed what he called “a new type, the American type” of rabbi—someone who could relate to younger Jews who respected tradition but also wanted “to break down these ghetto walls” and “live as their neighbors, as Americans.” Orthodox Judaism “can have little hope of survival” in the United States unless younger men “who are both genuinely Jewish and genuinely American occupy American pulpits,” he wrote.

The rabbi’s challenge bordered on the impossible: to go against the mainstream culture and attract a generation of young people sliding into the American melting pot.

An out-of-the-box thinker—and in many ways a precursor to modern kiruv efforts—he sought out Jews who had drifted far from synagogue life. He would visit pool halls and other gathering places and encourage young Jews to return to synagogue life. He also organized Friday evening forums in his synagogue, not just to give young people an opportunity to learn Torah together but to keep them away from pool halls and gambling casinos; many were already that far from their roots, even if their parents had been raised Orthodox.

The rabbi’s challenge bordered on the impossible: to go against the mainstream culture and attract a generation of young people sliding into the American melting pot.

Rabbi Goldstein was called a maverick for good reason. He tried every possible approach to draw people into his synagogue. He managed to convince generations of Jews eager to “Americanize” that since Americans espouse Judeo-Christian values, to be a good American one must also be a good Jew.

To lure young people into the synagogue, he introduced an innovative idea: turning the shul into a multipurpose institution serving the physical, recreational and social needs of the local Jewish population under the auspices of a synagogue and talmud Torah (Hebrew school).

In 1917, that vision was realized when he launched the Institutional Synagogue, so named because it resembled the era’s popular Protestant institutional churches, which offered athletics, classes, clubs and employment assistance.

The trend-setting Institutional Synagogue merged the synagogue and talmud Torah—at one point enrolling more than 1,000 students—with the community center, which included a gym, a swimming pool and more than sixty social clubs.

Rabbi Goldstein’s “shul with a pool” became a model for what later developed into the modern-day synagogue-based Jewish community center. Situated in Harlem—when that neighborhood had a large Jewish population—the Institutional Synagogue was so successful that at its height it served more than 3,000 people a day from all walks of life.

The success of the Institutional Synagogue also helped propel Rabbi Goldstein into national leadership. Even as he immersed himself in the development of his synagogue, he took on leadership roles in the Jewish organizational world, most notably serving as the third president of the Orthodox Union beginning in 1924.

OU Kosher was actually founded at the initiative of his wife, Rebecca Fischel Goldstein, a daughter of the leading Orthodox philanthropist Harry Fischel. As a co-founding president of the OU’s Women’s Branch—whose tenure overlapped with her husband’s presidency and continued somewhat longer—she famously remarked that she was tired of telling her children at the supermarket what they could not eat.

Her activism helped launch the OU’s program of systematic kashrut supervision, including on-site inspections of food manufacturing plants.

Rabbi Goldstein briefly served as the (unpaid) kosher supervisor for Sunshine Biscuits, the first company in the United States to arrange for OU supervision in the early 1920s and the first to bear the organization’s certification. At one point the packaging included an early Hebrew-language version of the OU insignia containing Rabbi Goldstein’s full name within a circle.

The agreement he secured with Heinz in 1925 set OU Kosher on the path to a century—and counting—of making kashrut observance more attainable.

Within the first few years of his presidency of the OU, high school and college groups were established with the direct involvement of his wife and the Women’s Branch, and kashrut supervision was extended to restaurants and even Passover products. He was also involved in kosher legislation and enforcement, advocacy for a five-day workweek, the creation of a rabbinic registry, the organization of itinerant rabbis, and even a weekly radio show.

Rabbi Goldstein’s administration at the OU was so transformative that many people for decades referred to him as one of its founders. In reality, he had been only about eight years old when the Union itself was founded. Yet he closely followed its founding president, Rabbi Dr. Henry Pereira Mendes, both as national president of the OU (with only one president serving in between) and as professor of homiletics at the rabbinical school associated with the institution that later evolved into Yeshiva University.

What made him relatively unique was his ability to see the good in both of the major political and organizational movements within Orthodox Judaism and to support each with comparable sincerity and enthusiasm. Students of his at the rabbinical school associated with Yeshiva University recalled that at one point he pulled two membership cards from his pocket: one for Mizrachi and one for Agudath Israel of America—organizations often seen as representing competing visions of Orthodox life.

An obituary that the New York Times ran in 1970 upon Rabbi Goldstein’s passing noted “his all-embracing devotion to Orthodox Judaism as well as his outspokenness.” The article continued: “Early in his ministry, Rabbi Goldstein said: ‘If I knew that by putting a jazz band outside the temple it would bring in thousands of people who never attend the synagogue, I would have no hesitancy in doing so. It makes little difference what forces or agencies we use to get men and women to attend the temple. All we need to worry about is to get them there.’”

Rabbi Aaron I. Reichel Esq. is a grandson and biographer of Rabbi Goldstein, and author of many publications. He also writes articles on the Daf Yomi and current events.