JERUSALEM (VINnews) — The Jewish woman who, as a teenager, refused to give Adolf Hitler flowers at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Nazi Germany has died at the age of 102.
Yocheved Gold managed to enter Berlin’s Olympic Stadium in August 1936 to watch the opening ceremony. Then 13 years old and appearing outwardly “German,” she was asked to join a procession of children presenting flowers to Hitler, who had been appointed Chancellor of Germany three years earlier.
“I saw him face to face and was a little afraid,” she recalled later in life. “That I, a Jewish girl, should give Hitler flowers? I refused.”
By the time of the 1936 Olympics, Germany under Hitler had already implemented a broad system of legal discrimination against Jews, effectively excluding them from public life.
With the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, Jews were stripped of German citizenship, barred from most professions, and socially and economically isolated.
Gold was born in the town of Halberstadt in central Germany in 1923. Her father, the esteemed rabbi Dr. Aharon Neuwirth, served as a rabbi and halachic authority in the communities of Mainz, Halberstadt, Berlin, and Amsterdam. Her mother was Sarah Chaya.
In 1938, when Gold was about 15, she witnessed the destruction of synagogues during Kristallnacht. At age 16, she fled to Haifa in Mandatory Palestine, while her parents remained in Europe.
She managed to maintain correspondence with her parents until the last year of the war, when their letters suddenly stopped. “I was sure they had been killed,” she said. Surprisingly, however, her parents survived both the war and the Holocaust.
According to Gold’s own testimony in interviews and in the book Shemirat Shabbat Kehilchatah, written by her brother Rabbi Yehoshua Neuwirth, her parents were saved through a series of unusual events.
One such incident occurred when her righteous father went to a pharmacy for treatment, but because it was Shabbat he refrained from taking the medication that night. According to the account in the book, the substance later turned out to be rat poison.
Her brother, Rabbi Yehoshua Yeshaya Neuwirth, head of Yeshivat Chochmat Shlomo, passed away in 2013. He is widely known for his halachic work Shemirat Shabbat Kehilchatah, a major guide to the laws of Shabbat and festivals that addresses many modern-era issues.
Another brother, Rabbi Reuven Yosef Raphael Neuwirth, who ran one of the most well-known free-loan funds in the Haredi world, passed away at the age of 94 about nine months ago.
Gold lived the rest of her life in Israel. She was among the founding members of Kibbutz Sa’ad, near the Gaza border. She married one of the kibbutz founders, Shmuel Gold, in 1942; he died in 1961 at just 40 years old.
She worked on the kibbutz for decades, holding various organizational and administrative roles before being appointed the kibbutz nurse, despite having no formal medical training. She served in that role for about four decades before retiring at age 69.
Remarkably, she survived all of Israel’s wars since the state’s founding, including the War of Independence and the Gaza war. On October 7, 2023, she spent 30 hours in a safe room with her son. She was later evacuated to a hotel near the Dead Sea but insisted on returning to her beloved community.
“I’m not prepared to die in a hotel,” she told her family. “Take me home. If I die, I’ll die there.” She returned to Sa’ad at age 100, and last month passed away at 102. She is survived by children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren.
