“Ben Gurion once reproached me with being a wandering Jew, I answered that some people have their roots in themselves and have no need to put them down in any particular soil…. I once told Ben-Gurion that he considered problems from the viewpoint of Sde Boker, his little kibbutz, whereas I saw them from a plane flying twelve thousand metres high. It is a different approach.”

Dr. Nahum Goldmann

The Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the only international body dedicated solely to advancing Jewish cultural activities, was established by Dr. Nahum Goldmann in 1965 with reparation funds from the then government of West Germany.

Nahum Goldmann was a remarkable visionary and an extraordinary leader whose history mirrors that of the Jewish people and the state of Israel.

He was the chief architect of the pact pledging West Germany to pay reparations to Israel and to individual Jews for acts committed during the Nazi Holocaust; he was president of the World Zionist Organization; the founder of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations; and served for many years as President of the World Jewish Congress, which he helped to found in 1936.

In January 2003, Beit Hatfutsot, the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora (which Goldmann helped found) hosted an exhibition, Statesman without a State: Nahum Goldmann, 1894-1982. The exhibition accompanied an international conference on Goldmann, marking the 20th anniversary of his passing (under the auspices of the Zionist Research Institute at Tel Aviv University, in cooperation with Brandeis University and with the support of the Claims Conference and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture).