ENGLISH CORNER, CON LINDA JIMÉNEZ – This week’s trivia question: Where did Golda Meir usually spend her weekends when she was Prime Minister of Israel?
Golda Meir was born on May 3, 1898, in Kyiv, Ukraine. She immigrated to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the United States with her family at the age of 8. Meir was an activist even as a teenager, organizing a campaign to raise money for the schoolbooks of fellow classmates who could not afford them. By the age of 15, she was an active Zionist, became a teacher by the age of 19 at a Yiddish-speaking school and married Morris Meyerson. Her pre-condition for marrying her husband was that he would agree to make aliyah with her to what was then known as Palestine, which they did in 1921. They joined a kibbutz and Golda became active in the kibbutz movement and later the Histradrut, the labor federation for the Jewish community in Palestine.
After moving to Tel Aviv with her family to continue her work for the Histadrut, in 1932 she was sent to the United States for 2 years as a Zionist emissary. When she returned to Palestine, she became a member of the Executive Committee of the Histadrut, and was an observer at the 1938 Evian Conference. Throughout World War II, Meir served in several key roles in the Jewish Agency, which functioned as the government of British Palestine and in 1946 she took over as the acting head of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department after many leaders of the Zionist movement were arrested by the British.
At the beginning of 1948, Meir traveled to the United States and raised $50 million to purchase weapons to defend the State of Israel when it was declared in May and the War of Independence began. She was one of two women who signed Israel’s Declaration of Independence. She was issued the first official Israeli passport when she traveled to the USSR to become the Jewish state’s first Ambassador to the Soviet Union, and became Labor Minister and Foreign Minister upon her return to Israel in the 1950s.
In 1969, after the sudden death of Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir became Israel’s Prime Minister. She resigned in April 1974 after controversies surrounding the surprise attack on Israel by Egypt and Syria in October 1973, in what became known as the Yom Kippur War. Until her death from cancer in 1978, she devoted her energies to fight on behalf of Soviet Jewry and other causes. To this day, she remains one of the most admired, as well as controversial, figures in Jewish history.
To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, this week we are offering you an excerpt from Meir’s autobiography, My Life, which was originally published in 1975. We have taken it from the anthology Celebrating the Jewish Holidays, edited by Steven J. Rubin and published by Brandeis University Press in 2003.
