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Bob dylan song bar mitzvah3/21/2023 ![]() Roger was only a few years older than us and born just around the corner from here. “Him and Roger Maris of the Yankees,” said Goldfine, pointing to a framed black and white photograph of the baseball star hanging on the wall above the Living Room sofa display. “Well, he sure put Hibbing on the map, wouldn’t you say, Izzy?” They say he’s been back once or twice but never let anyone know.” I guess they had some kind of an idea where he was headed, though Bobby never kept in touch with anyone after he left, at least not as far as I know. Abe and Beatty – Bobby’s parents – had promised Bobby a transistor radio and a guitar for his Bar Mitzvah. “He was just like the rest of us Jewish kids who took lessons after school from an old, itinerant Rabbi with a white beard and black hat who lived above the juke box joint. “I was at Bobby’s bar mitzvah and let me tell you he was no Pavarotti and no Sinatra either,” recounts Goldfine who still bides his days puttering around the furniture shop now run by his son, Stan. “That’s him alright”, says the seventy-seven year old Goldfine after the Pastor plays a sample from the tape, the warbling shrill resembling more the high notes of the famous singer’s harmonica than his gravely voice today. But at least one old time resident, Isadore Goldfine, of Goldfine & Sons Fine Furniture on Main Street, swears by the tape. ![]() “It’s been a challenge to authenticate the tape since most of the Jewish community of Hibbing has migrated to the twin cities (Minneapolis and St.Paul) and places beyond,” says the Pastor, himself a third generation native of Hibbing of Scandinavian heritage. Little did anyone present know that this would also mark the first public performance ever to be given by the future world famous singer and Nobel Prize laureate for literature. Abe and Beatty Zimmerman ‘s son had reached his thirteenth birthday, which according to the tenets of the faith marks the day that a Jewish boy becomes a man. Nearly the entire Jewish community that inhabited Hibbing and surrounding Iron Range, (consisting of some several dozen members at its peak), had gathered to mark the auspicious occasion. The date inscribed in faded ink on the inside of the old Sony reel, May 22,1954, indeed coincides with the actual date of the Bar Mitzvah ceremony that was held at the Agudath Achim Synagogue on 2nd Avenue. What Pastor Helgason had uncovered in the basement of the old Synagogue turned Church was none other than the original audio tape from the Bar Mitzvah rehearsal of one Robert Alan Zimmerman. “No mistaking that voice belonged to the prodigal son of Hibbing.” “I would know that nasal sound anywhere,”Pastor Wendell said, bursting with hometown pride. It turned out to be the Synagogue Cantor’s own recording of each boy’s Bar Mitzvah rehearsal. He was about to turn off the tape when he heard a distinct voice that he immediately recognized. When Pastor Helgason dusted off and activated the old Sony reel to reel he was intrigued at first by the melodic chanting which he assumed to be the young men’s Hebrew choir. It was an audio tape recording from the days before the Church moved in and took over the mortgage from the former owners, the Agudath Achim Synagogue which closed its doors in 1964 due to a dwindling local Jewish population. ![]() Pastor Wendell Helgason of the Wesley United Methodist Church, in Hibbing, Minnesota discovered a rare artifact in the basement of the Church last Easter Sunday.
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