Watchmaker, Warden, Scholar, Mensch

In Loving Memory of Solomon Goldberg

18th April 1940 – 3rd February 2025 10 Nisan 5700 AM – 5 Shevat 5785 AM

Solomon Goldberg was born on 18 April 1940 in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, the only son of Rivka and Nathan Goldberg, who had arrived from Kaunas in 1936 with a watchmaker's toolkit and very little else. He grew up in the tight weave of the Manchester Jewish community, attended Manchester Grammar School on scholarship, and qualified as a watchmaker under his father's instruction before opening his own shop — Goldberg & Son Horologists — on Bury New Road in 1966. The shop became a neighbourhood institution and remained open until Solomon's retirement in 2008.

He served the Prestwich Hebrew Congregation as warden for thirty-one years, a role he discharged with characteristic diligence and dry humour. He sat on the bimah with the quiet authority of a man who had read the entire siddur so many times he could be in two places at once — present in prayer and watchful over the congregation simultaneously. He was known as the person you went to with a problem, because he would listen properly, give you his honest view, and then point out the thing you had not thought of. This service was free but he accepted cake.

In 1965 he married Ruth Fischer, who remains the most important decision of his life, as he said at their golden anniversary. They had two children, Rachel and Daniel. He was a grandfather of four and a great-grandfather of one, who arrived just in time for him to hold.

Solomon passed away on 3 February 2025 at Prestwich. He is survived by Ruth, Rachel, Daniel, and all who loved him. Baruch Dayan HaEmet.

Eulogy

For My Father

My father was a watchmaker by trade, which means he spent his working life taking apart something that looks simple and revealing it to be extraordinarily complex. He brought the same approach to people. He was interested in how they worked. He did not make assumptions. He asked questions, listened to the answers, and treated the answer as information rather than confirmation of what he already thought. This is rarer in a person than it ought to be. He was also, and this perhaps surprised people who did not know him well, very funny. A dry, patient, surgical humour that arrived when you were least expecting it and departed before you were sure you had heard it right. He deployed it most lethally in the synagogue committee, where it served as a pressure-release valve for situations that might otherwise have become arguments. He loved Ruth with an uncomplicated wholeness that their children found extremely instructive. He said she was the only person he had ever met who was reliably right about things that mattered, and he had learned to listen accordingly. He said this in front of her often. She always pretended to be exasperated by it. She was not. He held his great-granddaughter Lila, who was six weeks old, three times before he died. He said she had very good timing. She did.
Rachel Goldstein · 8 Jun 2026
Memory

Shabbat at Waterpark Road

Friday evening at my parents' house had a particular quality I have never fully been able to describe. By six o'clock the house smelled of soup and the table was set and the candles were ready and something in the atmosphere had shifted — the week was receding and something quieter was arriving. Dad would come in from the shop, still in his work clothes, and twenty minutes later he would be at the table in a clean shirt looking like a different person. The kiddush in his voice. The same blessing, every week, for fifty years. That is not nothing.
Rachel Goldstein · 8 Jun 2026
Memory

The Way He Listened

I had a very difficult period about fifteen years ago, the kind you do not talk about easily. I went to Solomon not because I had any particular plan but because I trusted him. He listened to the whole thing without interrupting, which took some time. Then he asked me one question — not a fixing question, a clarifying one — that unlocked something I had been unable to see. I have no idea how he knew to ask it. I think he was simply paying attention in a way most people are not.
Miriam Katz · 8 Jun 2026
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