Rachel Gordon liked to kvetch, but she liked to laugh just as much. In fact, a few weeks before she died she even told Rabbi Mark Bloom a joke with a crass punch line — and the Oakland rabbi laughed.
Gordon, a Holocaust survivor who lived in Oakland, died Friday, Sept. 16. She was 93.
Rachel Stern was born April 10, 1912 in a small village in Lithuania near Kovno. Her family was quite poor. She would recall the family taking their food to the baker before Shabbat and picking it up after Shabbat, because the oven there stayed hot.
After she finished high school, she went to Kovno, where she met and married Hershel Kobel in 1931. They had a son, Aaron, who was born in 1932, and ran a small store.
When the war started, they were forced into the Kovno ghetto. Herschel worked in forced labor outside of the ghetto gates, and one day, Gordon had a premonition. She told her husband to take their son to work with him. When they returned that night to the ghetto, all the children had been taken away.
When the ghetto was liquidated, Gordon was separated from her husband and son. She was sent to the Stutthoff concentration camp, near Danzig.
The only member of her family to survive besides her was her son.
She made her way to Berlin after the war, where she was reunited with Aaron. While still there, she was tipped off to go to the West, so she did so before the Berlin Wall was erected. She then went to a displaced persons camp, where she met and married Jacob Gordon, another survivor, in 1946. Jacob Gordon had a son, Murray, who became her stepson.
In 1949, the Gordons came to New York, where Rachel worked as a seamstress. In 1955, they moved to San Francisco, following their children. They opened a launderette in the Tenderloin, where they lived for about five years.
Then they moved to Oakland, where they became active at Congregation Beth Jacob.
In 1966, they took a trip to Israel, a lifelong dream. Jacob Gordon became sick from the air conditioning on the flight, and later suffered a heart attack and died.
She was only in her 50s when she was widowed a second time, and soon learned how to drive. She was active in Hadassah and served as president of Pioneer Women (now called Na’amat). She also switched to Congregation Beth Abraham when Beth Jacob began separating the men from the women. As traditional as she was, she didn’t like that.
Her granddaughter, Shelley Gordon of Oakland, said her grandmother made wonderful challah and cookies with berry or apricot filling. She was also a pessimist, who felt she had experienced more than her fair share of hardship in life between the war, being widowed young and having all kinds of illnesses including diabetes, made all the worse because she loved sweets.
But she also could laugh about it, said her granddaughter. “When she kidded with her doctor that she had every possible ailment, he said to her ‘there’s one thing you won’t get, prostate cancer,’ which she found very funny,” said Gordon.
She was also very active in the Friendship Circle senior group of the Oakland Jewish Community Center.
“Grandma also enjoyed going to parties and was very interested in current events. She only read nonfiction, she didn’t like fluff,” said her granddaughter.
In addition to her husband, Jacob, predeceasing her, Gordon was predeceased by her son, Aaron in 1996. In addition to her granddaughter, Shelley Gordon of Oakland, she is survived by stepson Murray Gordon of Piedmont, four more grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
Donations in her memory can be made to Temple Beth Abraham, 327 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland, CA 94610.