Last Sunday, the Jewish community lost Jona Goldrich, a visionary, passionate leader, a museum pioneer, advocate, philanthropist and builder. With great sadness and respect, and an enormous sense of loss, we honor his extraordinary life. Jona was a man whose impact on the City of Los Angeles was immeasurable, and his passion, determination and commitment to creating a memorial and educational space at the heart of this city that would be free and open to all helped make possible our precious Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. The institutions, programs, lives rebuilt, and promise of poignant possibility that are his legacy will, in his absence, continue to thrive with fortifying ripples reaching across this city and the country into future generations.
Jona was born in Turka, Poland, on Sept. 11, 1927, to Sender and Elza Goldreich. Sender, a successful business man in the lumber industry with a deep connection to his Jewish heritage, believed in the importance of education, and Jona and his two brothers grew up speaking Polish, Hebrew and Yiddish, studying mathematics and science, and reading extensively. When the Nazis occupied their region in 1941, Jona’s father made arrangements to smuggle the family to Hungary. Jona and his younger brother made the trip first and arrived successfully in Hungary, but their older brother did not want to leave their parents. Sender, Elza and Jona’s older brother were denounced and caught and eventually perished during the Holocaust. In Hungary, Jona worked tirelessly to organize forged papers so that he and his younger brother could immigrate to Palestine, and they arrived there in 1943. After a decade in Israel, he immigrated to the United States, where he married his wife, Doretta, and raised two daughters, Melinda Goldrich and Andrea Cayton (Barry), and three grandchildren, Garrett, Lindsay and Derek Cayton.
Here in Los Angeles, as founder and lifetime supporter of Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, Jona helped create a home for education and memory that on the day of his passing was doing the work he spent his life envisioning and creating. And so we allow ourselves to take some comfort in the thought that we might strive to carry forward his legacy and honor the hopes he expressed to me each and every time I saw him over the last years: “You have to keep teaching the young people.” This week, in the quiet space of the outdoor Goldrich Family Foundation Children's Memorial, just as the news of his passing reached us, students from across Los Angeles were learning and reflecting and young men and women, grandchildren of survivors, were in dialogue with Holocaust survivors, learning how lives were rebuilt here in L.A, and how loss and unimaginable pain were met with hope and possibility and determination to create new lives and a better future.
Today, when I called Lidia Budgor, 91, Jona’s fellow founding board member and an Auschwitz survivor, she said, “another giant has left us.” May we gather together and reflect on the giants in our community and the shoulders we stand upon. May we live to make their memories a dignified and compassionate blessing all the world around.
Jona laid a wide and sturdy path for our city; we chart the future with fierce and tender connection to the past and to all those we've lost. May his memory be a blessing.
Samara Hutman is executive director of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust in Pan Pacific Park.
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