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Rhoda Haas Goldman

American philanthropist

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMay 15, 2026
Entity authorityQ7320845 ↗
Source-derived summary

Rhoda Haas Goldman (September 20, 1924 – February 17, 1996) was an American billionaire in San Francisco, California. She was a member of the board of directors of Levi Strauss & Co. from 1985 until her death in 1996.

Biography

Rhoda Goldman was the only daughter born to Walter A. Haas and Elise Stern (an heiress to the Levi Strauss fortune), and great-granddaughter of David Stern. In 1996, her family made $1.3 billion in accepting the leveraged buyout of the Levi Strauss company, which she opposed. She died of a heart attack during the execution of the transaction.

She was a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and, in 1946, she married fellow Berkeley alumnus Richard N. Goldman. In 1951, the couple founded the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, a foundation that has donated over $680 million to various organizations.

The Goldman School of Public Policy at Berkeley is named after the Goldmans.

She was president of the San Francisco Symphony, chairwoman of San Francisco's Memorial to the Six Million Victims of the Holocaust, director of the Mount Zion Health System, president of the Mount Zion Hospital and Medical Center, and president of Congregation Emanu-El, the city's largest Reform Jewish synagogue.

Editorial summary

“Rhoda Haas Goldman” enters the record as american philanthropist. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Rhoda, Haas and Goldman can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1924, 1996, 1985, 1946—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1924-01-01. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Rhoda, Haas and Goldman.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Rhoda Haas Goldman” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Rhoda, Haas and Goldman provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7320845. VIAF identifies the subject as 58707376. The Library of Congress control number is no98130613. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1924, 1996, 1985 and 1946.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Rhoda Haas Goldman” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.