On 29 August 1982, co-founder and president of the World Jewish Congress Nahum Goldmann passed away in Bad Reichenhall, Germany at the age of 87.
Nahum Goldmann was born into an ardent Zionist family in the Russian Empire, in what is today Belarus. In fact, in his autobiography, Goldmann wrote, ''I can hardly say when I became a Zionist. Even as a child I was a Zionist without knowing it, inasmuch as I took over my father’s concepts and his positive attitude to everything Jewish as axioms of my heritage.”
At the age of six, Goldmann moved with his parents to Frankfurt. In 1911, while still in high school, he and his father attended the Tenth Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. In 1913, he visited Palestine for four months, eventually publishing his impressions of the adventure in his book Eretz Israel: Travel letters from Palestine at the age of 18.
After he was stripped of his German citizenship in 1935, Goldmann became a citizen of Honduras. He was a vocal and ardent supporter of the idea of establishing a Jewish state alongside an Arab one in Palestine, arguing that independence and the creation of a “a viable Jewish state in an adequate area of Palestine" was more important than controlling a specific territory.
Following the death of WJC founding President Rabbi Stephen S. Wise in 1949, Goldmann took over as president of the World Jewish Congress. From 1951 he also served as chairman of the Executive Committee of the Jewish Agency and the driving force behind the establishment of the Claims Conference, and he negotiated an agreement with the West German government for reparations.
After the founding of the Claims Conference, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion wrote to Goldmann, “For the first time in the history of the Jewish people, oppressed and plundered for hundreds of years…the oppressor and plunderer has had to hand back some of the spoil and pay collective compensation for part of the material losses.”
From 1956 to 1968, he also served as president of the World Zionist Organization. Goldmann never felt that a Jewish state would answer the needs of all Jews, and that a strong Diaspora would always be a reality, if not an ideal.
Goldmann was buried in Jerusalem's Mount Herzl National Cemetery. He was survived by his wife Alice and his two sons, Guido and Michael.
Upon hearing of his passing, then-Labor Party leader Shimon Peres called Goldmann a man of "rare ability for oratory and brilliant rhetoric. He was at one point the bridge that joined continents and movements in the life of the Zionist movement. He died while seeing the country from an opposing view, but this was his own choice."
