TIMES PAST FIVE FACTS ABOUT Ezra Golombok
1WHEN he was a teenager, after completing his Highers, Ezra Golombok left his native Govanhill to travel through France and Switzerland with his older brother. When they reached the German border, they found the place covered in Nazi flags, and decided to turn back. It was a wise decision – two months later, the Second World War broke out.
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Ezra was born in August 1922, and died earlier this year, just a few months before his 100th birthday. He is best known in the city for publishing and editing the Jewish Echo, something he did for more than 40 years after following in the footsteps of his father, Zevi.
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His obituary in our sister newspaper The Herald notes: “As he grew older he did experience some casual antisemitism while at school, such as a teacher who referred dismissively to his academic success as ‘you people always want to get ahead’; the antisemitic posters in a cinema on Aikenhead Road; and the rejection from certain civil defence activities
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because of his foreign name.” Ezra studied for a BSc in chemistry at the Royal Technical College (later Strathclyde University) and completed a PhD at Glasgow
University. During the war, he was assigned to an RAF manufacturing plant and recalled once working at night by himself preparing hydrogen cyanide. His tutor remarked he had, in fact, prepared enough to poison half of Glasgow.
5He married Susan Heimler, a Hungarian-Israeli emigrant who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp, in 1958, and had two children, Ruth and Michael. After the Jewish Echo closed down in 1992, Ezra continued to work into his 90s, producing a weekly online newsletter keeping the Jewish community informed of developments in Israel and the Middle East.