JERUSALEM — One’s life expectancy at 102 certainly can’t be very long. But Belle Goldstein, who moved here in March 1998 and became the oldest-ever North American immigrant, was given almost four more years — and made the most of them.
Goldstein, who died Sunday three months before her 106th birthday, spent most of her final years speaking before American Mizrahi Women, helping people, keeping up with the news by reading the Jerusalem Post and other newspapers, and praying for the good of the country.
She became something of a sensation after her arrival, with the Jewish Agency making a big fuss and foreign and local media begging for TV, radio, and newspaper interviews.
Danny Tal, the Jewish Agency emissary in New York who saw her off, said she was “the embodiment of 100 years of Zionism.” As Tal recalled it, when Goldstein’s daughter Leona Malka Goldfeld, then 73, first approached him, “I thought the aliyah was for her.” Goldfeld said, “No, it’s my mother,” she said.
Goldstein was not the oldest person to immigrate here, however; there are two who arrived from the former Soviet Union at 111.
The daughter of Leopold (Levi) Horowitz, one of four brothers and a sister who founded the famed Horowitz-Margareten matzah bakery on New York’s Lower East Side in 1884, Goldstein is a descendant of the 16th century Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz, who is buried in Tiberias next to Maimonides.
Of her seven siblings, only one sister — Mildred, 93, who lives in New York — survives. “Mother always believed she was put on Earth to perform mitzvot, and that’s what she tried to do,” said her daughter Raisel Rauchwerger, a retired English teacher who immigrated with her husband Leon in 1946 and lived for years in Kfar Batya, named for Goldstein’s sister-in-law and Zionist pioneer Bessie Gotsfeld. After immigrating to Israel, Goldstein resided close to Goldfeld in Kfar Gidon near Afula, and for the last 2-1/2 years with the Rauchwergers in Ramat Gan, which — as a city girl — she preferred to an isolated agricultural village.
Born in Brooklyn 20 months before the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, launched the movement for political Zionism, Goldstein attended most of the Zionist congresses since, including the pre-Holocaust 21st congress in 1939. For most of her life, Goldstein was active in AMW, serving as its national president from 1942-1947.
Goldstein is survived by three children, seven grandchildren, and 19 great-grandchildren in Israel and the United States.