A Model of Fearlessness: What Rabbi Daniel Zemel ’79 Is Finding in His Grandfather’s Archives

For more than three decades, Rabbi Daniel Zemel led Temple Micah in Washington, D.C., quoting scholars, poets, and thinkers from the pulpit. He did it so often that on retirement, his congregants gifted him with "baseball" cards featuring the scholars he quoted most often. Those cards included his wife, Louise, and another relative, known to his congregation as Grandpa Goldman.

Now, Zemel, courtesy of the Rabbi Theodore S. Levy Tribute Fellowship at the AJA, is spending his first year in retirement doing something he never had time for as a working rabbi: sitting in an archive, reading his grandfather's life letter by letter.

His grandfather, Rabbi Solomon Goldman, was a towering, if now lesser-known, figure in American Jewish life. Born in Ukraine and brought to the United States at age seven, Goldman grew up in an Orthodox immigrant household in Brooklyn and rose quickly through the ranks of the Jewish Theological Seminary. He went on to serve as a rabbi in Cleveland, where his congregation once sued him for modernizing worship practices like mixed seating, and later became a nationally prominent voice in Chicago. He served as president of the Zionist Organization of America from 1938 to 1941, moved in the same circles as Louis Brandeis and Stephen Wise, and published his own prayer book through the Jewish Publication Society in 1931, notable for its inclusion of non-Jewish voices like Byron, Huxley, and Shelley.

Goldman died seven months after Zemel was born, which means the grandson's understanding of him has been built entirely through family stories, an old biography, and now, directly, through Goldman's own papers, held at Hebrew Union College's Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati.

Temple Micah funded Zemel's research as a retirement gift, and he's since committed to raising a significant amount to help digitize the collection. Two weeklong visits in, he describes the experience as akin to building a relationship. "I'm getting to know him as a person, and that is enormously personally fulfilling for me."

One afternoon, sorting through a folder of miscellaneous 1947 correspondence, he came across a letter Goldman had written to the son of family friends on the occasion of his bar mitzvah. He had sent the boy a stack of 13 books, and the letter explained his thinking behind the gift. "The letter was so instructive. I wish I'd read it when I was a 40-year-old rabbi. He's not simply sending him a bar mitzvah gift; he's giving him an entire curriculum, but a curriculum that's filled with love."

Zemel's research is now organized around three threads: his grandfather's complicated, often disillusioned relationship with Zionist politics; the theology embedded in his 1931 prayer book; and the personal letters that reveal the man behind the public record. He hopes to have a finished essay - possibly two - by next spring, aimed less at a mass audience than at fellow rabbis and engaged Jewish readers who might, in his words, "be inspired by the kind of rabbi my grandfather was."

Dr. Dana Herman, Associate Director of the AJA, called Zemel's project "exactly what the archives were built for," noting that "his research shows how personal and communal inheritance intertwine. Through his grandfather's papers, he is discovering both a family legacy and a chapter of the American Jewish story."

Goldman was, by his grandson's account, fearless - willing to be sued, to be a public critic, to hold unpopular positions inside his own movement at a time when "the ground was shaking" for American Jews. Zemel sees that fearlessness as instructive for a moment he describes as shaking once again. He has even come to believe that every student passing through Hebrew Union College should be required to spend time in the archives, the way he now wishes he had decades earlier, as a young rabbi rather than a retired one.