GOLINKIN, MORDECHAI YA'AKOV

GOLINKIN, MORDECHAI YA'AKOV (1884–1974), Orthodox rabbi, religious Zionist, av bet din. Born in the Kherson district of Ukraine and orphaned at a young age, Golinkin studied in the Lithuanian yeshivot of Lomza, Tiktin, and Lida, where he was called "the Khersoner Ilui" (prodigy). He was ordained in 1904 by Rabbi Mordechai (Slonimer) Oshminer and Rabbi Binyamin Ze'ev Zakheim of Yekaterinoslav. In 1913 he published a book of sermons (Derashot Harim, Jerusalem, 20012). He then became the av bet vin and de facto chief rabbi of Zhitomir, capital of the Volyn (Volhynia) district of Ukraine where he developed a youth organization called Tiferet Bakhurim for 1,200 young men. Golinkin developed a good relationship with the governor of Volyn. As a result, Golinkin persuaded him to exempt from the Russian draft the yeshivah students of Novaredok who had fled to Zhitomir and he also prevented a blood libel in Zhitomir at the time of the beilis blood libel in Kiev in the fall of 1913. After the February Revolution of 1917, Golinkin and rabbi solomon aronson of Kiev (later of Tel Aviv) and rabbi judah leib zirelson of Kishinev formed Aḥdut, which proclaimed the religious and cultural rights of the Jews of Russia. After the October Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent pogroms of petlyura , Golinkin and his family fled to Vilna, where he worked at a number of Jewish institutions. Golinkin served as rabbi of Dokshitz near Vilna, where he founded a Yavneh religious Zionist day school and traveled to other cities to found Yavneh schools. From 1936 to 1939 he served as chief rabbi and av bet din of the Free State of Danzig, where he supervised the kashrut on the many ships embarking from Danzig and Gdynia. Since the Nazis forbade kosher slaughter, he arranged sheḥitah in the Polish town of Ossawa. After most of the Jews of Danzig fled before the Holocaust, Golinkin escaped to the United States in 1939, where he served as rabbi of Worcester, Massachusetts, until his death. In October 1943, Golinkin participated in the historic March on Washington demanding action to save the Jews of Europe. Golinkin also served as av bet din of the Orthodox Rabbinical Court of Justice of the Associated Synagogues of Massachusetts for over two decades, presiding over cases of national prominence. In 1969–1970, the Boston bet din spent 10 months studying the subject of civil disobedience and conscientious objection in light of the Vietnam War. In January 1970, it issued a 54-page responsum to the seven major questions. The Boston bet din showed that a rabbinic court could function as an activist court, which could go way beyond the domain of family matters. Golinkin's son rabbi noah golinkin , a Conservative rabbi, was an activist during the Holocaust and a prominent Hebrew educator in North America. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: R. Medoff, The Jewish Chronicle (of Worcester), 77:20 (Sept. 25, 2003), 1, 21; A.Z. Rand (ed.), Toledot Anshei Shem (1950), 8; R. Gelmis, Look Magazine (April 1, 1969), 69; H. Levine and L. Harmon, The Death of an American Jewish Community (1992), 184–193; Newsweek (April 17, 1972), 54–55; I.M. Schaeffer, The National Jewish Monthly, 89:3 (November 1974), 28–38. (David Golinkin (2nd ed.) GOLINKIN, NOAH GOLINKIN, NOAH (1914–2003), U.S. rabbi. After studying at various yeshivot and earning a law degree in Vilna, Noah Golinkin emigrated from his native Poland to the United States in 1938. He earned a master's degree in American history at Clark University before enrolling as a rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. In late 1942, Golinkin and fellow JTS students Jerome Lipnick and Moshe "Buddy" Sachs, Golinkin established the "European Committee of the Student Body of the Jewish Theological Seminary," to publicize the plight of Europe's Jews. Their first public program was a Jewish-Christian inter-seminary conference on European Jewry, in February 1943. Several hundred students and faculty, including representatives of eleven Christian seminaries, attended the sessions, which alternated between JTS and the nearby Union Theological Seminary. Speakers included prominent Jewish and Christian leaders and relief experts. In a series of letters and articles in the spring of 1943, Golinkin and his colleagues took American Jewry to task for not actively pressing the Roosevelt administration to rescue Jews from Hitler. Their words of rebuke made a strong impression on the Synagogue Council of America, the national umbrella group for Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform synagogues. Shortly after meeting with Golinkin, Lipnick, and Sachs, the Synagogue Council established an emergency committee to raise Jewish and Christian awareness of the Nazi genocide and urge Allied intervention. Closely following suggestions made by the students, the Synagogue Council undertook a nationwide campaign to coincide with the traditional seven weeks of semi-mourning between Passover and Shavuot. Numerous synagogues adopted the proposals to recite special prayers for European Jewry, limit "occasions of amusement," observe partial fast days and moments of silence, write letters to political officials and   Christian religious leaders, hold memorial rallies, and wear black armbands. The rallies, held around the country on May 2, 1943, in many instances were jointly sponsored by Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox rabbis. The Federal Council of Churches organized memorial assemblies at churches in a number of cities on the same day, although Christian participation overall was modest. The gatherings received significant media coverage and increased public awareness of the Nazi slaughter of European Jewry. After the war, Golinkin held pulpits in Virginia, Maryland, and elsewhere, and was the founding director of the Board of Jewish Education of Greater Washington, D.C. Fearing that the Hebrew language would become as little known to American Jews as Latin is to most Catholics, Golinkin created the Hebrew Literacy Campaign in 1963. In twelve weeks, every adult in the synagogue could read the prayer book, and the synagogue won the Solomon Schechter Award. He later expanded his efforts and convinced the National Federation of Jewish Men's Clubs to adopt the program. Golinkin's textbook Shalom Aleichem (1978) has sold over 100,000 copies, and the 1981 sequel, Ein Keloheinu, which teaches the Shabbat morning service, has been translated into Russian and Hungarian. His 1987 book, While Standing on One Foot, used in conjunction with a program he called the Hebrew Reading Marathon, teaches adults how to read Hebrew in one day. This book has been used by over 700 synagogues in 45 states, Canada, and Australia. It is estimated that more than 150,000 Jewish adults have learned how to read Hebrew in the two Golinkin programs since the 1960s. Golinkin was also the originator, in 1989, of the custom, observed by a number of synagogues and Jewish organizations, to plant yellow tulips on Holocaust Remembrance Day as a reminder of the yellow star that Jews were forced by the Nazis to wear on their clothing. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: N. Golinkin et al, "The Holocaust Period," in: The Reconstructionist, 9:2 (March 5, 1943), 19–21; R. Medoff, in: Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 11:2 (Fall 1997); N. Golinkin, "The Hebrew Programs" in: Proceedings of the Rabbinical Assembly, 39 (1977), 62–67; 41 (1979), 193–196; 49 (1987), 226–230; T he Washington Post (March 8, 2003), B7; D. Golinkin, Insight Israel: The View from Schechter (2003), 157–67.