Jerusalem loses a colorful character with the passing of Ezra Gorodesky
In his native Philadelphia, a great aunt showed him pictures of the Holy Land during boyhood visits, and he knew he would make his home in Palestine one day.
By GREER FAY CASHMANEZRA GORODESKY on the cover of the ‘Jerusalem Report’ in 2018.(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
Jerusalem has lost one of its most colorful characters with the passing this week of Ezra Gorodesky at age 92 from the coronavirus.Gorodesky could best be described as an intellectual leprechaun. His face almost always bore a mischievous elfin grin. Curious about everything, he collected almost anything – rare books and manuscripts, works of art, buttons, glassware, Chinese pottery, teapots, miniatures and more.Gorodesky was always immaculately and dramatically attired. Whether in a three-piece suit or casual dress he always wore a vest. Brandishing a cane and with a cape flowing from his shoulders, he looked like the leading man in a period play.In his native Philadelphia, a great aunt showed him pictures of the Holy Land during boyhood visits, and he knew he would make his home in Palestine one day.By the time he did, Palestine was already Israel. In 1960 Gorodesky came for a month to see if he could feel at home in the country he loved from a distance. The month turned into more than sixty years.Gorodesky never renewed his US passport. He was particularly unhappy with the country’s immigration policy during World War Two, when tens of thousands of endangered Jews were denied entry to America by the Roosevelt administration.Prior to leaving Philadelphia, Gorodesky visited Rabbi Max D. Klein, the spiritual leader of the Adath Jeshurun Congregation who suggested he meet in Jerusalem with a friend who had studied years earlier with him at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Her name was Rebecca Affachiner.In Philadelphia, Gorodesky had worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Arts, and haunted flea markets, auctions and garage sales. He scoured synagogues for historical documents.Everything had a story of some kind which Gorodesky researched passionately and painstakingly.After settling in Israel and becoming a close friend of Affachiner, Gorodesky began taking apart books and finding centuries-old documents hidden in the spines. Repairing the books afterwards was costly so Gorodesky became a proficient book binder.Affachiner, who had been the first female graduate of JTS, had left America for Jerusalem in 1934. In May 1948 she refused a US consular official’s entreaty to leave the city in anticipation of hostilities. Wanting to be ready for the expected proclamation of the Jewish state, Affachiner sewed a torn bed sheet into a makeshift Israeli flag.As soon as she heard David Ben-Gurion’s proclamation, she hung the flag over her balcony and did so every Independence Day until she passed it on to Gorodesky before she died in 1966. He cherished it for many years.As he aged, he sought a permanent home for it at the university in the Negev named for Ben-Gurion and donated it in 2018.Gorodesky never married and most recently lived in a one room apartment in Nahlaot. His collections were his children, and like children left the nest for new homes.He donated more than a thousand documents and rare books to the National Library, his button collection to Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art and other collections elsewhere. The space vacated went to a new collection of objects that piqued his interest.
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