Jacob Goldberg

Jacob Goldberg was born in 1924 in Łódź

Jacob Goldberg was born in 1924 in Łódź, Poland. His grandparents were Hasidim, while his parents were secular, and his father was a merchant. His father fled to Warsaw in 1939 and died in the Warsaw Ghetto.

During the Holocaust he spent 4 years in the Łódź Ghetto and then several concentration camps, including Buchenwald. He took part in a death march and was freed on May 8, 1945. His whole family died in the Holocaust.

After the war he returned to Łódź, studied history at the University of Łódź and wrote his doctorate there on agricultural towns in Poland. He taught Polish history and social and economic history there for 16 years.

He moved to Israel in 1967 and worked at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People. In 1969 he began teaching at the Hebrew University, and he retired as a full professor in 1993. His research focused on Polish Jews in the 16th to 18th centuries, based mainly on court and notary records.

In 1993 he became the first Jew to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Warsaw. He was a foreign member of two Polish academies and was married to Professor Olga Goldberg-Mulkiewicz. He died in 2011.