A job as zoo director fulfilled Dr. Jeremy Goodman’s wildest dreams

Photos: Naftoli Goldgrab

“It’s a pretty good zoo,”

Said young Gerald McGrew.

“And the person who runs it

Seems proud of it too.”

Lots of kids grow up on the Dr. Seuss classic, If I Ran the Zoo. But Dr. Jeremy Goodman, the executive director of the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence, Rhode Island, actually took the title to heart. Today, like the zookeeper in Dr. Seuss’s story, he has ample reason to be proud of his work.

“I always loved animals and zoos,” says this modern-day zoo profesional, tall and rangy, clad in khakis and a royal blue polo shirt emblazoned with the park logo, a leather yarmulke on his head. “I’ve been obsessed since I was two years old. My parents were the type who would bring us to the library every week, and I went through every book about animals. I always begged them to take me to the zoo, and we’d always find another one whenever we went on vacation.”

Born in Highland Park, near Chicago, his family moved to Parsippany, New Jersey, when he was four. The standard childhood pets, like cats and dogs, held no charm for him; instead he preferred gerbils, hamsters, lizards, snakes, birds, rabbits, fish, turtles — “the exotics,” he says. His parents were tolerant, even after his mother was startled by a lizard skittling out of the laundry basket when she went to put in a load of sheets.

His guidance counselor at Frisch yeshivah high school urged him to go to college at Yeshiva University.

“But,” he protested, “they have no animal programs there.”

“Just take a pre-med curriculum — it’s all the same material,” she told him.

But 18-year-old Jeremy wasn’t convinced. Instead, he chose to attend Rutgers University, where he majored in animal science. Then he applied to veterinary school as the most expedient path to working in a zoo.

The competition to get into vet school is fierce. His grades were good but not stellar, and he attributes his success in gaining admission to Tufts to the passion he exuded. Once there, his course of studies often required running to a rav with sh’eilos, since a Jew is prohibited from practices like spaying, neutering, and treating animals on Shabbos. Ever since, he’s been impressively successful in meshing his religious and professional obligations. (The local rabbanim he consults, who don’t often deal with animal-related questions, exclaim with some frequency, “Well, that’s a sh’eilah I never got before.”)

“In every zoo I’ve worked in, we put protocols in place about Shabbos,” Dr. Goodman says. “The staff knows I’ll leave the answering machine on, so maybe my wife or I will hear it. I can’t treat animals on Shabbos, but sometimes the staff will drive to my house to ask for direction about what to do.”

One Rosh Hashanah in the years he was the director of the Turtle Back Zoo in West Orange, New Jersey, in the middle of the tefillah, the zoo curator banged on the door of the shul bearing an African black-footed penguin suffering an epileptic seizure.

“She knew where I was, so she put the penguin in a car and drove over,” Dr. Goodman relates. (He instructed her to administer Diazepam —apparently any animal can have a seizure.)

In 1996, during his last year at Tufts, Dr. Goodman met his wife, Marina. As Marina began her own journey coming back to her traditional Jewish roots, she grappled with the role of women in Judaism and eventually shared the inspiring answers she discovered on her spiritual odyssey in her book Why Should I Stand Behind the Mechitza When I Could Be a Prayer Leader? (Targum Press, 2002).

While in vet school, Goodman was able to secure a rotation at the Biblical Zoo in Jerusalem, and later moved to an internship at a specialty animal hospital in Deal, New Jersey. He spent some time after that in private practice in a clinic for cats and dogs before his big break appeared in the spring of 2000: an offer to serve as the veterinarian and assistant director of the Potawatomi Zoo in South Bend, Indiana.

He convinced Marina to leave the East Coast by promising her that if the community had no eiruv, he’d build one himself.

“It took me four years to build it, and then we left,” he says with a shrug.

The eiruv notwithstanding, the years in South Bend were happy.

“It was a very nice community with a great zoo and great yeshivah,” Dr. Goodman says.

He would sometimes go to the yeshivah to teach the kids about kosher animals, including a few rare endangered species. Whenever an animal at the zoo died, the zoo staff would conduct a necropsy to determine the cause — and Rabbi Yisrael Gettinger, the city’s rav, once attended in order to expand his own understanding of Chullin.