Insight !ACeS Remember When • • „eas Unlikely Turn Of Events From the pages of the Jewish News for this week 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 years ago. Splintered Reform Party faction chooses a California Jew as its vice-presidential candidate. ANDY ALTMAN-OH R Jewish Bulletin of Northern California San Francisco A Jewish multimillionaire from California who went to the Reform Party convention to enjoy it wound up as the splin- tered party's vice-presidential candidate. At the convention held in Long Beach, Calif, Nat Goldhaber of Berkeley was selected on Aug. 12 to be the running mare of John Hagelin, whom the party's anti-Pat Buchanan fac- tion chose for its presidential candidate. Goldhaber, 52, and his wife, Marilyn, say the turn of events caught them by surprise. "I went down there to enjoy the convention and to avoid all the dirty tricks of Mr. Buchanan," Goldhaber said. "Dr. Hagelin asked me if I wanted to be chairman of his campaign and I said 'sure,' even though I was a little reluctant to do that. Then he prevailed Nat Goldhaber on me to at least put my hat in the ring [as a running mate] and I won by a majority among four candidates." Goldhaber's name is not familiar to most Americans, even though he is a multimillionaire and well-known in California's Silicon Valley. In 1987, he sold a software com- pany he developed, Tops, to Sun Microsystems Inc. for a reported $20 million. Recently, he pocketed about 6 per- cent of MyPoints.com , worth about $27 million on paper, when the company completed a merger with Goldhaber's Oakland-based Cybergold Inc. In 1995, he founded Cybergold, which offers rewards to customers as an incentive to respond to Web site ads and offers. He has headed several other start-up companies as well, and owns two planes, a Cessna 414 and a Citation jet. Upstaged Goldhaber's status as a Jewish candidate might have received more play in the media had he not been beaten to the punch a few days earlier by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D- Conn., who was named as Vice President Al Gore's running mate on the Democratic ticket. "Excellent," Goldhaber said was his initial reaction when he heard about Gore's choice. "It's terrific that Jews are now being considered for senior positions in the American polit- ical domain, but we're still a long way from having a Jewish president," he said. "The good thing is that the U.S. is iter- ating in the direction of greater tolerance in all areas." 1990 The Goldhaber family joined Temple Sinai, a Reform synagogue, in Oakland about four years ago. The couple's 12-year-old triplets, who attend Jewish day school, are only 10 months away from celebrating "a triple bar mitzvah" at Sinai. His Vienna-born mother, Sulamith, moved to pre-state Israel as a teenager. She met her German-born husband, Gerson, who was raised in Egypt, when both attended Hebrew University in Jerusalem in the late 1940s. "Both sets of grandparents had the good sense to figure out what was coming and get out [of Austria and Germany] in plenty of time," Goldhaber said of his ancestors' exodus in the mid-1930s. Sulamith and Gerson Goldhaber immigrated to the United Stares to pursue doc- torates at the University of Wisconsin, she in nuclear chem- istry and he in physics. Goldhaber said he is "not actively involved with any Jewish organizations," although his wife, a U.C.-Berkeley graduate and epidemiologist, is a lifetime member of Hadassah, the Zionist women's organization. As for attend- ing synagogue, he said, "we don't go weekly, but we do occasionally." Goldhaber, who holds a master's degree in education from U.C.- Berkeley, spent five years working in Pennsylvania state government as an aide to Lt. Gov. William Scranton III and as an interim state energy secre- tary in the wake of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. A devotee of Transcendental Meditation, as is Hagelin, Goldhaber also holds a bachelor's degree from Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa. He said two of his reasons for backing Hagelin are the candidate's positions on finding renewable energy sources and agricultural reform. "I am very much for promoting indigenous energy sources," Goldhaber said. "Jews are activists and generally dissatisfied with the status quo," he explained, defining the Reform Party as one that has a reform-oriented political agenda but no social agenda. The vice-presidential candidate said Hagelin is "a big supporter of Israel" as well as "a supporter of applying sci- entific innovation to the solution of very real problems which, in my estimation, is a Jewish outlook." Young Israel of Southfield and Temple Shir Shalom celebrated the addition of new Torahs. Hiram Dorfman and David Engelbert are co-chairs of the Holocaust Memorial Center anniversary dinner. 1980 The Israel embassies of Guatemala and the Dominican Republic are moved from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. 1970 Ground-breaking ceremonies take place for the new Beth Abraham Synagogue on Maple Road in West Bloomfield. Rabbi Jacob Bakst is named supervisor of kashrut [kosher] at Detroit's Sinai Hospital, succeeding his late father Rabbi David Bakst. 1990 The New York City Board of Education plan to close schools on Rosh HaShana comes under legal attack from, the Freethinkers of America. Alumni of Boy Scout Troop 135, sponsored by the Congregation B'nai David Men's Club, are plan- ning a 25th anniversary reunion dinner at Rainbow Terrace on Wyoming Avenue in Detroit. Herbert Polk of Detroit has been named assistant director of physical education at the Jewish Center in Buffalo, N.Y. 1950 A self-imposed draft to provide Jewish chaplains for the U.S. armed forces is adopted by the Rabbinical Assembly of America. Wayne University officials announce that students assigned to register on the two days of Rosh HaShana may do so by proxy. The Zionist Organization of America presents a silver plaque to President Harry Truman for his part in the founding of Israel. — Compiled by Sy Manello, editorial assistant ❑ 9/8 2000 33