A Jewish woman who, as a young girl, refused to present flowers to Adolf Hitler during the opening ceremony of the Berlin Olympics has passed away at the age of 102. Mrs. Yocheved Gold a”h, sister of two prominent rabbonim from the Neuwirth family, passed away after a life that spanned Nazi Germany, the Holocaust era, and the entire history of the State of Israel.
Yocheved was 13 years old when she entered Berlin’s Olympic Stadium in August 1936 to watch the opening ceremony of the Games. Because she looked German, she was asked to join a group of children selected to hand flowers to Hitler, who had been appointed chancellor of Germany three years earlier. She refused.
“I saw him face to face and I was a little afraid,” she later recalled. “That I, a Jew, should give Hitler flowers? I refused.”
By the time of the 1936 Olympics, Germany under Hitler had already enacted sweeping legal discrimination against Jews, effectively pushing them out of public life. The passage of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 stripped Jews of German citizenship, barred them from most professions, and isolated them socially and economically.
Yocheved was born in 1923 in the town of Halberstadt in central Germany. Her father, Rabbi Dr. Aharon Neuwirth, served as a rov and dayan in several communities, including Mainz, Halberstadt, Berlin, and Amsterdam. Her mother was Mrs. Sara Chaya Neuwirth.
In 1938, when Yocheved was about 15, she witnessed the destruction of shuls during Kristallnacht. A year later, at the age of 16, she fled to Haifa in Mandatory Palestine, leaving her parents behind in Europe.
She managed to maintain correspondence with her parents until the final year of World War II, when their letters suddenly stopped. “I was sure they had been killed,” she later said. Unexpectedly, her parents survived the war and the Holocaust.
According to Yocheved’s own testimony in interviews and accounts recorded in the sefer Shemiras Shabbos Kehilchasa, written by her brother Hagaon Rav Yehoshua Neuwirth, her parents were saved through a series of extraordinary events. One such incident occurred when her father went to a pharmacy for treatment. Because it was Shabbos, he refrained from taking the medication that night. The substance later turned out to be rat poison.
Rav Yehoshua Neuwirth, who headed Yeshivas Chochmat Shlomo, was niftar in 2013. He was widely known as the author of the aformentioned Shemiras Shabbos Kehilchasah, a foundational and widely used work on the halachos of Shabbos.
Another brother, Rav Reuven Yosef Raphael Neuwirth, was renowned for running one of the most prominent free-loan funds in the chareidi world. He passed away nine months ago at the age of 94.
Yocheved spent the rest of her life in Israel. She was among the founding members of Kibbutz Sa’ad, located near the Gaza border. In 1942, she married Shmuel Gold, one of the kibbutz’s founders. He died in 1961 at the age of 40.
Over the course of decades, Yocheved worked in a wide range of administrative and organizational roles at the kibbutz. She was eventually appointed as the kibbutz nurse, despite lacking formal medical training, and held the position for approximately 40 years before retiring at age 69.
Remarkably, she lived through every major war fought by Israel since its founding, including the War of Independence and later conflicts in Gaza. On October 7, 2023, she spent 30 hours in a fortified safe room with her son during the Hamas attack. She was later evacuated to a hotel near the Dead Sea but insisted on returning home.
“I’m not willing to die in a hotel,” she told her family. “Take me back home. If I die, I will die there.”
She returned to Kibbutz Sa’ad at the age of 100. She passed away at 102, leaving behind children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren.
Yehi zichrah boruch.
{Matzav.com}