Wolf Gold

Wolf Gold was born in 1889 in Szczuczyn

Wolf Gold was born in 1889 in Szczuczyn, Poland, into a family with a long line of rabbis on his father's side. His first teacher was his maternal grandfather, Rabbi Yehoshuah Goldwasser, a leader in Hovevei Zion.

He studied at the Mir yeshiva and later at the yeshiva of Rabbi Yitzchak Yaacov Reines in Lida, which combined Torah and secular studies. He was ordained as a rabbi and took over his father-in-law's post as rabbi in Juteka.

He moved to the United States and served as rabbi in Chicago, Scranton, Williamsburg, San Francisco and Borough Park. He founded the Williamsburg Talmud Torah and, in 1917, Yeshiva Torah Vodaas, and in 1920 started the Beth Moshe hospital in Brooklyn. In 1914 he invited Rabbi Meir Berlin to organize Mizrachi in the United States, and in 1932 he became president of American Mizrachi.

In 1935 he settled in Palestine and worked on Torah education in the Diaspora. He sat on the Jewish Agency Executive, heading its Department for Jerusalem Development, and was part of the Jewish delegation to the UN General Assembly in 1946. He was a member of the Provisional State Council and signed the Declaration of Independence in 1948.

He died in Jerusalem in 1956 and was buried near Rabbi Meir Bar-Ilan. In 1958 a teacher training college named Machon Gold was founded in Jerusalem in his name.