Word: goldstein
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Everyone who knew him growing up agrees that Benjamin Goldstein -- Benjy, as they called him -- was a religious boy. In Bensonhurst, his middle-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, the piety of his Orthodox Jewish family set them apart from more secular Jewish neighbors. Though his father worked for the New York City Board of Education, the young Goldstein, with his side curls and yarmulke, attended school at a yeshiva. His faith seemed to draw him apart from others into an otherworldly solitude. If there was a tongue of flame in his heart, so much as a flicker of anything like bloodlust...
...Arabs he called them Nazis; and finally the killer who fired round after round into a terrified crowd of people at prayer. As he lived among the most vitriolic fringe elements of the Israeli settlers in the West Bank -- many of whom began their lives, like him, as Americans -- Goldstein's religion became indistinguishable from his rage. This was not a sweet and generous doctor who suddenly snapped, but a man so full of hate he repeatedly ^ threatened to do precisely what he did that Friday morning: kill as many Arabs as possible to settle "his people's" scores...
Some who knew him say Goldstein experienced an emotional crisis in December, when two of his friends were ambushed by Arab attackers near Kiryat Arba, the West Bank settlement just outside the Palestinian city of Hebron that has long been a magnet for the most aggressive Jewish ultranationalists. As head of the local emergency medical team, Goldstein was called, and Mordechai Lapid and his 19-year-old son died in his arms. "After a number of friends and neighbors died, he considered the Arabs to be Nazis," says Kiryat Arba resident David Ramati...
Long before then, Goldstein had been consumed by a love of Israel deeply tainted by a thirst for vengeance. At Yeshiva University in New York City, he was a first-rate student, graduating in 1977 with highest honors and a special prize from his classmates for his character, personality and service. At the same time he was already a devoted adherent of Kahane, whose Jewish Defense League advocated violence against anyone it perceived as a threat to Jews. In a 1981 letter to the editor of the New York Times, Goldstein echoed the rabbi's call for the forcible expulsion...
After earning a medical degree at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, he emigrated to Israel in 1983. He met and married a fellow Kahane supporter; Kahane himself performed the wedding ceremony. Goldstein changed his first name to Baruch and eventually settled in Kiryat Arba. In time his parents, as well as his brother and sister, followed him to the West Bank...