By the time of the Olympic Games in 1936, Germany under Hitler had already put in place a wide-ranging system of legal discrimination against Jewish people, effectively excluding the community from public life.
With the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, Jews were stripped of German citizenship, barred from most professions, and isolated socially and economically.
Gold was born in the town of Halberstadt in central Germany in 1923. Her father, Dr Aharon Neuwirth, was a rabbi, while her mother, Sara (neé Bamberger), was a descendant of a line of prominent 19th-century German rabbis.
In 1938, when Gold was around the age of 15, she witnessed the destruction of synagogues during Kristallnacht. At 16, she fled to Haifa in British-controlled Mandatory Palestine, with her parents remaining in Europe.
She managed to maintain correspondence with her parents until the final year of the war, when their letters abruptly stopped. “I was sure they had been killed,” she reflected years later. But, remarkably, her parents survived the war and the Shoah.
According to Gold’s own accounts shared in interviews and the book Shemirat Shabbat Kehilchata, written by her brother, Rabbi Yehoshua Neuwirth, her parents escaped death through a succession of extraordinary events.
One such reprieve occurred when her father went to a pharmacy for treatment but, because it happened to be Shabbat, refrained from taking his medication that night. According to the book, the substance later proved to be rat poison.
Adolf Hitler watching the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin with the Italian Crown Prince (Credit: Fox Photos/Getty Images)Getty Images
Gold lived the remainder of her life in Israel. She studied economics at the Mizrachi Home for Young Women in Jerusalem and was later part of the founding community of Kibbutz Sa’ad, near the Gaza border. She married fellow kibbutz founder Shmuel Gold in 1942, though died in 1961 aged just 40.
She worked in the kibbutz for decades, fulfilling a variety of organisational and administrative roles before being appointed as the kibbutz’s nurse despite no formal medical training. She held the position for some four decades before retiring at the age of 69.
Remarkably, she lived through every Israeli conflct from the nation’s founding, including the War of Independence and Gaza War.
On October 7, 2023, she spent 30 hours in a reinforced safe room with her son. Afterwards, she was transferred to a hotel near the Dead Sea but was adamant that she return to her beloved community.
“I’m not willing to die in a hotel,” she told her family, “Bring me back home. If I die, I’ll die there.”
She returned to Sa’ad aged 100 and, last month, passed away at age 102. She is survived by her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren.
A young girl presents a bouquet of flowers to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler during the opening ceremony of the 1936 Berlin Olympics (Credit: Fox Photos/Getty Images)Getty Images