Name: Joe Goldwasser
Age: 89
Hobby: Avid bridge player
Career: Dentist
Family: Wife, the late Esther; son, Michael, a surgeon; daughter, Lynne G. Schiftan, retired attorney
Having turned 89 last month, Joe Goldwasser has been thinking about the times in his life that gave him a sense of fulfillment.
“I was thinking about what got me the most satisfaction in my career,” he said, “and it was in giving.”
A dentist since the early 1950s, Goldwasser recalled a two-month period of time when he participated in an outreach that may have affected him as much as it did the lives he touched then.
“I took a trip to Israel in a city that is now being bombed,” he said. “My wife went with me and she taught the children English while I was a dentist, and that was gratifying.”
It was long after he had been drafted into the U.S. Navy during World War II. It was after the Navy sent him to dental school. When he got out after the war, he completed his schooling at Columbia University in his hometown of New York City.
And it was after the military recalled him during the Korean War and he served in the U.S. Air Force a couple of years. His last duty station was at Seymour Johnson in Goldsboro.
He and his wife Esther, now deceased, settled in Kinston and raised two children.
Goldwasser said he opened his dental practice on Queen Street. There were two waiting rooms — one for coloreds and one for whites. He picked up the sign designating coloreds, tossed it into the second waiting room, locked the door and never used the room.
All Goldwasser’s patients — black, white and any other color — had their dental work done in the same room, while his peers only worked on the teeth of the blacks after dark, he said.
Years later, he moved his practice by the mall where Dr. Harold Lancaster now practices family dentistry.
His dental career was one of the most fulfilling aspects of his life. But it wasn’t the only one. In the mid-1980s, Goldwasser retired.
“The day after I retired,” he said, “I left for Israel.” He and his wife had been to the tourist spots many times before, but this was different.
He had heard about a fraternity that was sponsoring dentists to provide care for Russian refugees living near the border of the Gaza Strip.
“The only real volunteer work, outside of my office,” he said, “was done in Israel.”
When the plane landed in Tel Aviv, a driver met the couple and took them more than 50 miles to a small town called Sderot in the desert.
Goldwasser found it amusing that the apartment they were given had with a shower in the bathroom that was not enclosed. There was a drain in the bathroom floor.
He set to work providing needed dental work to the refugees who did not speak English, and he didn’t speak Russian. However, they both knew Yiddish. The local children didn’t, so Esther began teaching them how to speak English. The Russian people, displaced from their homeland, were appreciative, he said.
“The country was in a state of military preparedness,” he said, “but we got a very warm reception.”
When they would take a bus ride to Jerusalem, they were often accompanied by armed military men. It was rumored the Israelis had an atom bomb factory near the town where he volunteered, but “nobody talked about it.”
The dental equipment, donated by Johnson & Johnson, was modern and in good condition, he said.
The needs of the people, though, were greater than Goldwasser could keep up with, but “we did what we could.”
Now about 25 years later, the man who was known to treat all types of people fairly has looked back and concluded — it was the giving moments in life that are the most rewarding.
Margaret Fisher can be reached at 252-559-1082 or Margaret.Fisher@Kinston.com. Follow her on Twitter @MargaretFishr.