Joshua Louis Goldberg (January 6, 1896 – December 24, 1994) was a Belarusian-born American rabbi, who was the first rabbi to be commissioned as a U.S. Navy chaplain in World War II (and only the third to serve in the Navy in its history), the first to reach the rank of Navy Captain (the equivalent of Army Colonel), and the first to retire after a full active-duty career. He had a highly unusual military background for a U.S. Navy chaplain, having been drafted into the Russian army when he was a teenager, then deserting to make his way to the United States where he enlisted in the U.S. Army, serving in an infantry unit in Europe during World War I before beginning rabbinical school studies in New York City after the war. Life and works Early life Goldberg was born on January 6, 1896, in Belarus (then part of the Russian Empire), the son of a lumber merchant in Babruysk, and educated in Odessa, Ukraine and Tel Aviv (then part of Palestine). He was drafted into the Imperial Russian Army when he was 18, serving as a Private until deserting his unit to flee Russia after the collapse of the Russian western front. He was able to reach the United States in 1916, after an eight-month journey by way of Siberia, Manchuria, Korea, and Japan. He arrived in Seattle and traveled to New York, where he returned to the military, enlisting to serve with artillery units in the American Expeditionary Forces in France during World War I. He served in the army 1917–1920, leaving as a sergeant. Goldberg recounted that when the Army recruiter who enlisted him discovered that he spoke almost no English, he should "keep his mouth shut." Goldberg followed the recruiter's advice, secretly spending "many an hour at night in the latrine at Fort Slocum, hiding with my [Russian-English] dictionary, trying to maintain my goal of mastering 50 new words every day." Once in France, Goldberg's fluency in French was often put to use through service as an interpreter. In addition to English and French, Goldberg spoke four other languages: Yiddish, German, Hebrew, and Russian. After the war, he returned to America to teach Hebrew, then began rabbinical studies at the Jewish Institute of Religion in Manhattan, and was ordained in 1926, accepting the position of rabbi at New York's Astoria Center of Israel in 1926. While