Ina Golub Papers

Ina Golub (October 28, 1938-October 20, 2015) was a New Jersey-based artist who primarily created fiber-based works with Jewish themes. She created custom-designed fiber art, including tapestries, Jewish ceremonial objects, and textiles with secular content, for synagogues, museums, and private collectors.

Golub was born Ina Joan Rudman in Newark, New Jersey, the first of two daughters of Frieda and Irving Rudman. Her father was a musician and artist, her mother a housewife and craft hobbyist. Golub’s early childhood and elementary school years were spent in Irvington and Newark, New Jersey. She showed an early interest in the arts and credited her father with introducing her to fibers. In order to amuse her while she was home from school with the measles, he taught her to knit. As a child, she was always drawing and painting, and in her teen and early adult years, she sewed all her own clothing. She married Herbert Golub, a music professor at Kean College of New Jersey, in 1962.

Golub graduated from Weequahic High School, Newark, New Jersey, in 1956. She earned her bachelor's degree from Montclair State University in 1960 and her Master of Arts for Teachers degree from Indiana University in 1965. In addition to teaching, Golub has maintained a studio starting in 1965, where she created one-of-a-kind handcrafted fiber art for synagogues and private collectors.

In 1996, the Yeshiva University Museum held a major retrospective exhibition examining Golub's career. The exhibition ran from February 18 to July 31, at the museum's space at 2520 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY. In 1998, her Havdalah spice container "Adon Livyatan" won the Philip and Sylvia Spertus Judaica Prize.

Adapted from the biography printed in the catalog accompanying Golub's Yeshiva University Museum exhibition, "Ina Golub: The Work of the Weaver in Colors" (1996) and supplemented with information from inagolub.com.