[1] As a child in 1937, he was admonished by his mother for leaving the house to watch Adolf Hitler pass by in a motorcade, telling him that: "A Jew risks a lot doing that".
[1] He would lose dozens of family members in The Holocaust, and maintained a commitment to the preservation of the Jewish religion and identity exemplified by his grandfather's having given him shreds of a Torah scroll the day after the November 1938 Kristallnacht that had been desecrated and thrown into a river during the anti-Jewish pogrom and telling Gottschalk that "one day we will put them together again".
[1] His family settled in Brooklyn, where he learned English while watching films he had paid for with money he had earned shining shoes.
[2] In 1965, he earned his Ph.D. in Bible and Jewish thought from University of Southern California with a dissertation on Ahad Ha'am, the pen name of pre-state Zionist thinker and essayist Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg.
[1][2] After being hired by Hebrew Union College, he became dean of its campus in Los Angeles, which he relocated from the Hollywood Hills to a site adjoining the University of Southern California.
[6] In 1975, Rabbi Gottschalk oversaw the designation of American Reform Judaism's first female hazzan (cantor), Barbara Herman.
[3] The seminary later established the Institute for Judaism and Sexual Orientation to help create opportunities for active participation by gays and lesbians in the Jewish life cycle.
)"[11] Appointed by President of the United States Jimmy Carter to a commission tasked with developing a memorial to the Holocaust, Gottschalk advocated on behalf of something more substantial than a monument, leading to the development of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum which opened in 1993 adjacent to the National Mall in Washington, D.C.[1] As president of New York City's Museum of Jewish Heritage from 2000 until 2003, Gottschalk oversaw the development and fundraising for the 60,000 square feet (5,600 m2) Robert M. Morgenthau wing of the museum.
[2] Rabbi David Ellenson delivered a eulogy in funeral services held in Cincinnati's Isaac M. Wise Temple.