As the announcement of Israel’s birth was taking place, the old order was coming to an end. That night, the last British official quietly boarded the cruiser Euralysus at Haifa harbor and slipped out of Palestine. As they had promised, Arab armies from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt—equipped with tanks, armored cars, and abundant ammunition and using the air forces of Egypt, Iraq, and Syria—began an invasion. Their actions were denounced by Trygve Lie and many others for their “brazen defiance” of the United Nations. The Haganah, soon to be renamed the Israel Defense Forces, did not have weapons and equipment comparable to the Arabs’ firepower. But they were highly motivated and mobilized, drawing on the resources of the Jewish community in Palestine and beyond. For them, as Weizmann said, the choice was between victory and annihilation.
On May 16, a Salute to Israel rally, organized by AZEC, took place in Madison Square Garden, with 19,000 jammed into the Garden and a throng estimated at 75,000 turned away. They listened as Senator Robert Taft, New York City Mayor William O’Dwyer, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., and Rabbis Wise and Silver celebrated the new state and called on the government to lift the arms embargo. Dr. Emanuel Neumann, AZEC’s chairman, told the crowd, “The United States cannot recognize the new-born state on one day and then on the next abandon it to its fate.”1
Max Lowenthal was also working on the issue and was at the White House early in the morning, typing “a memo on the need for action by our gov’t in lifting embargo, and asking UN Security Council to act to stop invasion of Palestine.” Britain’s “helping Arabs,” he added, “—while we maintain an embargo—puts us in an awkward position.”2 Israel’s friends in the White House had some reason to believe that after he granted recognition, the president would help the new country. Truman had told Niles that the United States would have to go the “whole distance now with Israel.” Niles wasn’t sure exactly what that meant but thought that, among other things, Truman was contemplating an exchange of ambassadors.3
On May 17, Chaim Weizmann was elected president of Israel’s Provisional Council of State, a symbolic post of honor. Since no official exchange of diplomats had as yet occurred, he immediately asked Jacobson if he would serve as his unofficial envoy to the White House. Jacobson was glad to fill in and raised the issue of the arms embargo and the granting of a loan with Truman.4
The State Department, still smarting over its failure to prevent Israel’s creation and Truman’s recognition surprise, took out its frustration in what seemed like petty ways. As president of the new country, Weizmann had been invited to Washington by Truman, who offered to put him up in the official government guest residence, Blair House. Lovett was angry. “Weizmann is only the head of a state recognized de facto, not de jure,” he told Clifford. “If he stays at Blair House, that means de jure recognition.” Charlie Ross simply said, “Nuts.” The residence was government property to receive and lodge distinguished guests. He came up with an answer to satisfy Lovett and his needs of protocol. “If he stayed at the White House,” he said, “that would be de jure recognition.” Weizmann stayed at the guest house as planned.5
On May 24, Truman received the new president of Israel in the South Portico of the White House. Weizmann presented Truman with a Torah, a scroll containing in Hebrew the first five books of the Old Testament. Accepting it, Truman quipped, “Thanks, I always wanted one.” Later Truman would say the Torah was one of the greatest things he owned and it was very special because Weizmann had had to issue an injunction authorizing a Baptist to handle it.6 According to Vera Weizmann, the two men parted in a playful mood. “When Truman told Chaim that he was the President of so many millions of Americans,” Chaim retorted, “But I am the President of a million presidents!” The joke was not lost on Truman.7
At the meeting, Weizmann told Truman that it was essential to Israel’s safety to lift the embargo. Truman seemed sympathetic but gave him no assurances. Then Weizmann requested what he called “a medium sized loan,” which Israel needed for military and reconstruction purposes. The first phase of reconstruction would be to bring in 15,000 DPs from Germany a month. They were destitute and would need housing, transportation, and food.8 Truman was more positive about the loan and answered, “The Jews have a fine tradition for repaying their debts. I know it from my good friend Eddie.”9 Returning to Blair House before traveling back to Israel, Weizmann thanked the president for his first “official visit, coming soon after the recognition given to the new State of Israel,” which he knew would be “a source of satisfaction and encouragement to my people.” Weizmann then informed Truman that the new government had appointed Eliahu Epstein as its prospective first ambassador to the United States and expressed his hope that a minister to Israel would quickly be appointed.10
In June, when preparations were finally made to appoint a U.S. ambassador to Israel, State proposed one of its own, Charles Knox, who was well known to be an Arabist. Instead, Truman appointed James G. McDonald, a member of the Anglo-American Committee and supporter of the new state. Five weeks after the creation of Israel, “suddenly and as a complete surprise,” McDonald wrote, the phone rang. Answering it, he heard Clark Clifford’s voice. Clifford asked him to rush to the White House and to keep the visit confidential. “The President wants you to go to Israel as the Government’s first representative,” Clifford told him. “I am not canvassing a list; you are the one person I have been told to inquire about.” Before McDonald even had time to think it over, Clifford phoned again an hour later. “I have just seen the President; he is delighted and wants to make the announcement immediately.” McDonald was stunned. “I haven’t yet accepted,” he said. After promising him that his salary would be sufficient to support a family, a matter of concern for him, McDonald accepted. The president wanted McDonald to report directly to him. The appointment was made without the knowledge or approval of Secretary Marshall, who later told McDonald that he had opposed the appointment when he learned of it.11
Truman wanted to make some of his own personnel changes. Loy Henderson was number one on the White House’s removal list. The president thought, among other things, that Henderson had deliberately lied to him by claiming that Israel had no possibility of winning a war with the Arabs, ignoring Jewish intelligence reports that indicated the opposite.12 Using this as the reason, he asked Marshall to fire him. But as a career officer, Henderson could not be so easily disposed of. Learning that he could only be transferred from his Near East desk at State, Truman made him ambassador to India in 1948. Henderson went on to have a distinguished career as a diplomat but always remained bitter about the harsh and, in his opinion, false accusations made about him in regard to his role in the State Department’s policy in Palestine from 1945 to 1948.
Truman would give Israel only some of what it desired. Israel would not officially receive American arms, although the FBI, with J. Edgar Hoover’s permission, looked the other way and allowed arms to be smuggled into Israel through U.S. ports. After a series of truces (which gave the Jews a chance to receive new military equipment and arms) and despite the embargo, the Israelis outfought and outmaneuvered the Arab forces, which, in the end, suffered a humiliating defeat.
Fighting by themselves and with the new arms sold to them by Czechoslovakia, the Israelis would win and sign a truce on January 7, 1949.
The Israeli’s victory, first in their fight with the Arab Palestinians and then with the Arab states, can be attributed to the Arabs’ weaknesses as well as to the Israelis’ strengths. Unlike the Yishuv, the Arabs had not prepared for war. The Palestinian Arabs were without any real government or national militia and their villages and towns were dispersed and under local control. And although the Arab states had an overwhelming demographic advantage over Israel, they only recently had achieved independence and, except for Jordan, had inexperienced commanders and armies. Aside from aiming to destroy or prevent Israel from being created, they also had conflicting goals. A pragmatist, King Abdullah of Jordan aimed to seize part of what was supposed to be the Arab Palestinian State, mainly the West Bank. Egypt had its own territorial designs on Palestine, as did Syria.
In May 1949, one year after recognition, Israel gained full membership in the United Nations. The Truman administration gave Israel a $100 million loan. De jure recognition would finally be announced on January 31, 1949, after the Israeli elections. At the signing were Eddie Jacobson; Frank Goldman, the national president of B’nai B’rith; and Maurice Bisgyer, its secretary. When Eliahu Epstein became Israel’s first ambassador to the United States, he changed his last name to the Hebrew Elath, in honor of the area around the Gulf of Aqaba.13
After Israel was created, the historical and religious meaning of what he had done became more important to Truman, especially his role in the return of the Jews to Palestine. Truman shared his thoughts with Clifford about biblical prophecies concerning the Jews’ return to Zion in the Old Testament. Clifford, who considered himself an amateur Bible student, recalled exchanging passages with the president that dealt with the subject. One of the most striking quotes Clifford found was from Deuteronomy: “Moses went up from the plains of Moab unto the Mount of Nebo, the top of Isgah that is before Jericho, and the Lord showed him all the land from Gilead unto Dan…all the land of Judah unto the western sea and the south and the plain.” As Clifford remarked in 1988, “You can take an old biblical map and you could do quite a lot with that with the present boundaries of Israel.” That, he added, was what the Old Testament had promised to the Jewish leaders of the day.14 One of the president’s favorites, which he often quoted, was also from Deuteronomy: “Behold, I have given up the land before you. Go in and take possession of the land to which the Lord has sworn unto your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.” Others were from Genesis, which referred to “an everlasting possession.”
Similar remembrances came from Alfred Lilienthal, an Arabist and opponent of partition and then recognition. Lilienthal served during the Truman administration in the State Department and was a consultant to the U.S. delegation to the United Nations during its founding conference. Truman, he wrote, “was a Biblical fundamentalist who constantly pointed to these words of the Old Testament,” citing the same passage from Deuteronomy 1:8 that Clifford alluded to.15 These prophecies, for Truman, lent a stamp of approval from a higher authority to the decision to recognize Israel.
In the spring of 1949, Eliahu Elath accompanied Israel’s Chief Rabbi, Isaac Halevi Herzog, to a meeting with Truman. Truman asked him if he knew what he had done for the refugees and to establish Israel. Herzog “reflected for a moment and replied that when the President was still in his mother’s womb…the Lord had bestowed upon him the mission of helping his Chosen People at a time of despair and aiding in the fulfillment of His promise of Return to the Holy Land.” In ancient times, Rabbi Herzog continued, “a similar mission had once been imposed on the head of another great country, King Cyrus of Persia, who had also been given the task of helping to redeem the Jews from their dispersion and restoring them to the land of their forefathers.” At that point, Elath recalled, the Rabbi read aloud the words of Cyrus: “The Lord God of heaven hath…charged me to build him a House at Jerusalem, which is in Judah.” As Truman heard the Rabbi’s quote, “he rose from his chair and with great emotion, tears glistening in his eyes,…turned to the Chief Rabbi and asked him if his actions for the sake of the Jewish people were indeed to be interpreted thus and the hand of the Almighty was in the matters.” The Rabbi told Truman, “he had been given the task once fulfilled by the mighty king of Persia, and that he too, like Cyrus, would occupy a place of honor in the annals of the Jewish people.”16 Truman took the Rabbi’s words to heart. When Eddie Jacobson told an audience at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York that he was introducing the man who had helped create Israel, Truman quickly responded, “Helped create Israel? I am Cyrus I am Cyrus.”
Eliahu Elath, speaking years later as the president of Hebrew University, told his audience that the Bible was Truman’s “main source of knowledge of the history of Palestine in ancient times.” Quoting Truman’s farewell address as president, given on January 15, 1953, Elath singled out a passage that revealed his hopes for the Holy Land. Truman had said, “The Tigris and the Euphrates Valley can be made to bloom as it did in the time of Babylon and Nineveh. Israel can be made into the country of milk and honey as it was in the time of Joshua.” This passage, Elath thought, was not inserted “by mere chance.”17
When David Ben-Gurion, now the first prime minister of Israel, met Truman in New York City in 1961, he was surprised by Truman’s intense emotions. “I told [Truman],” Ben-Gurion wrote, “that as a foreigner I could not judge what would be his place in American history; but his helpfulness to us, his constant sympathy with our aims in Israel, his courageous decision to recognize our new State so quickly and his steadfast support since then had given him an immortal place in Jewish history.” After he spoke these words, Truman’s eyes were suddenly filled with tears. “I had rarely seen anyone so moved,” Ben-Gurion wrote. He held Truman back for a few moments until he regained his composure, so that the press waiting outside the hotel suite where they were meeting would not notice.18
In the next few years, Truman would lose many of the people he credited with helping to bring about the creation of Israel. In May 1951, Niles, who claimed fatigue after fifteen years of government service, submitted his resignation. Truman was reluctant to accept it and wrote to him, “You have been a tower of strength to me during the past six years and I can’t tell you how very much I appreciate it.” Niles wanted to travel, especially to Israel, but his health declined and he passed away from cancer on September 28, 1952, before making the trip.19
After a year of being seriously ill, Chaim Weizmann died of a heart attack on November 9, 1952. Truman had come to think of Weizmann as a friend and someone he could identify with.
When Weizmann wrote Truman a congratulatory letter after he won the presidential election in 1948, Truman wrote back to him on November 29, the anniversary of the U.N.’s partition decision, that he was struck by the similarities in their experiences. “We had both been abandoned by the so-called realistic experts to our supposedly forlorn lost cause. Yet we both kept pressing for what we were sure was right—and we were both proven to be right. My feeling of elation on the morning of November 3rd must have approximated your own feelings one year ago today, and on May 14th and on several occasions since then.” Truman ended with “I want to tell you how happy and impressed I have been at the remarkable progress made by the new State of Israel. What you have received at the hands of the world has been far less than was your due. But you have more than made the most of what you have received, and I admire you for it.”20
The hardest loss Truman suffered was that of Eddie Jacobson. The founding of Israel had brought the old friends closer together. In the difficult period before recognition, Eddie Jacobson had become an important intermediary between the Zionist movement and the president. He had then acted as an unofficial ambassador to Israel, until it got its officials up and running. Writing to Jacobson in 1952, Vera Weizmann told him, “Only the most intimate friends knew the extraordinary role that was played by you in swinging the scale in our favor when the future looked so precarious and ambiguous.”21 Perhaps the most important of his contributions had been convincing Truman to receive her husband at the critical moment. Jacobson and his wife, Bluma, did go to Israel and stayed at the home of the McDonalds.
After Truman returned home from the White House, he and Jacobson were often seen lunching together in Kansas City. In 1955, they began planning a trip of a lifetime.22 Truman was excited about the itinerary and wrote to Jacobson that they would leave by ship from New York for England, where Truman was to receive an honorary degree from Oxford. Then they would visit Winston Churchill and the queen. Next on the itinerary was Holland, where they would meet the royal family, and Paris, where they would meet political leaders. Then would be Rome, where Truman and Jacobson would have an audience with the Pope. Finally, Truman said, they would travel to Israel by ship, arriving in the port of Haifa around mid-October.23 Jacobson died of a heart attack in October of that year. Truman called off the trip and never went to Israel.
After Jacobson’s death, Truman said, “I don’t think I have ever known a man that I thought more of outside my own family than I did of Eddie Jacobson. He was an honorable man…. he was one of the finest men that ever walked on this earth…. Eddie was one of those men that you read about in the Torah…if you read the articles in Genesis concerning two just men…. [Enoch and Noah] you’ll find those descriptions will fit Eddie Jacobson to the dot.”24 After the funeral, he went to the family’s home to offer condolences. As tears clouded his eyes, he told Jacobson’s daughters, Gloria and Elinor, that their father was the “closest thing he had had to kinfolk.”25 “Eddie was one of the best friends I had in this world,” Truman told the press. “He was absolutely trustworthy. I don’t know how I’m going to get along without him.”26
The British and the State Department viewed Truman’s actions regarding the creation of Israel as the result of political expediency, i.e., a need for the Jewish vote or Jewish campaign contributions. Truman himself had encouraged this belief by complaining to Bevin and others about the pressures of the Jewish vote, especially in New York. It is true that Truman did not support a Jewish state in the way the Zionist movement did and would have preferred a democratic pluralist country like the United States to take root in Palestine. So we must ask, was gaining the Jewish vote the most important factor in motivating the president to recognize Israel and in taking the actions he did leading up to it? Would he have done it unless he thought it was in America’s national interests to do so?
Harry Truman was a politician. As president, he was the leader of the Democratic Party, and he could not ignore how his actions on Palestine would impact not only his own political fortunes, but those of his fellow Democrats, whether through votes or contributions. In a democracy, public opinion is bound to affect governmental policy. As much as they tried to separate it, in the case of the Jews and Palestine, domestic and foreign policy issues were tied together by very strong sentiments. With the horrors of the Holocaust and the continuing deprivations of the DPs fresh in the minds of Americans, there was widespread support for a just solution to the Jewish condition both within the American Jewish community and beyond. Because public opinion was behind it, the Republicans and the Wallace campaign in 1948 sought to outdo Truman on the issue and kept up a steady stream of criticism at how he was handling it. Truman often said that what he had done to help the Jews had backfired on him. It never seemed to be enough, and he deeply resented the pressure put on him by competing politicians and especially by the American Zionist Emergency Council. He said he was going to do what he thought was right despite the actions of those he called the “extreme Zionists.”
Richard Crossman, the British member of the Anglo-American Committee, was offended by the cynical arguments about Truman’s motivations, given that British democracy also had to respond to public opinion. Speaking in the House of Commons in January 1949, Crossman said it was easy to “make jibes about the votes in New York and to insult the President…. But if we had a million Jews in this country, our Cabinet might have been slightly more careful to keep their election pledges. Do not let us attack American politicians for what we ourselves would have done…anyone reckless enough to take the word of a State Department official who thought that he would wangle the White House into letting down the Jews cannot have had much experience and should not believe it.”27
Truman was angered and upset by the charge that he was motivated by political concerns. His actions, he maintained, were guided by humanitarian and moral considerations, and by his understanding that America’s national interests stood above all else. While he always seriously considered the State Department’s arguments and was often conflicted himself, in the end he concluded that recognizing Israel was in the national interest of the United States.
Truman had come full circle on the issue. He became president after serving in the Senate for ten years, from whose perch he had witnessed Hitler’s rise to power and the Nazis’ exterminationist policies against the Jews. In 1939, he denounced the British White Paper as making “a scrap of paper out of Lord Balfour’s promise to the Jews” for a national home in Palestine. He joined the Christian Zionist group, the American Palestine Committee, and even briefly was a member of Peter Bergson’s Committee for a Jewish Army. After taking office as president, one of his first meetings was with Rabbi Stephen Wise. He told Wise that he was confident that he both could look out for the long-term interests of the United States and still help the persecuted Jews of Europe find a home. In the end, Truman believed that he had achieved this goal.
The president’s counselor, Clark Clifford, was also outraged by this characterization of Truman. “To portray President Truman as risking the welfare of his country for cheap political advantage,” Clifford wrote, “is bitterly resented by all of us who admired and respected him.”28
To refute these charges, Clifford, considered to be the architect of Truman’s 1948 campaign strategy, pointed to a forty-three-page memorandum he presented to Truman in November 1947. Drafted by James Rowe, a former administrative assistant to FDR, and perfected by Clifford, it covered every aspect of the campaign. In the memo, Clifford argued that Truman should concentrate on winning the South and the states west of the Mississippi, which would allow him to discount the electoral votes of New York, as well as New Jersey, Illinois, and Ohio, states with a substantial Jewish population. Moreover, Clifford argued that a Jewish vote, if it existed, was an issue only in New York City. Truman would be more likely to win, Clifford advised, if he made policy based on an issue’s “intrinsic merit.”29
Clifford turned out to be prophetic. If the Jewish vote was a key to victory in the 1948 presidential election, making policy to gain that vote proved to be a dismal failure. The largest Jewish vote was in three East Coast and midwestern states: New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. New York City was home to the largest Jewish population in the world and the center of pro-Zionist sentiment. Yet Truman lost New York, whose Electoral College votes went to the Republican candidate, Thomas E. Dewey. Truman’s loss of the state had more to do with the third-party candidacy of Henry A. Wallace, who siphoned off labor, liberal, and Jewish votes, thereby enabling Dewey to win the state. Of the three states with a significant Jewish population, Truman won only Illinois.
Moreover, there is evidence that when Truman had a chance to make a blatant appeal for Jewish votes before the election, he turned down the opportunity. Chester Bowles, the Democratic candidate for governor of Connecticut, suggested during the 1948 presidential campaign that Truman grant de jure recognition to Israel on the eve of Yom Kippur, just as he had called for partition before the holiest night in 1946. Dewey was rumored to be preparing such a statement. If Truman lost the opportunity and delayed granting full recognition until later in October, Bowles wrote, he risked losing Connecticut. Action along those lines “is vital,” Bowles wrote. “I know how important [the issue] is in Connecticut; and if we are up against it here, it must be infinitely tougher in New York.”30
On September 9, Marshall announced that de jure recognition would not be granted to Israel until after it held an election, which was customary. The elections were scheduled for mid-October but, because of the Arab-Israeli war, did not take place until January 1949, when the war ended. Clifford suspected that Israel might not be able to hold its elections until after the American elections for president in November and argued that it wasn’t necessary to wait until Israel’s elections for the president to grant it.31 At that critical moment, when Truman knew that not granting de jure recognition could harm his presidential bid, he refused to do it.
It might be helpful in evaluating Truman’s efforts to define a U.S. policy for Palestine and his role in the creation of Israel to compare his path to that taken by Abraham Lincoln in the time of the American Civil War. In 1860, it was not clear that slavery would be abolished. Lincoln campaigned on the platform only of preventing slavery’s expansion into the new western territories, not on abolishing it where it already existed. For this view, Lincoln was castigated by the abolitionists and the radical Republicans, who saw the abolition of slavery as the only real issue. Lincoln was seen by them as a prevaricator, much as the Zionists saw Truman.32 When the Civil War erupted, Lincoln refused to free the slaves or enroll free blacks in the Union Army. Although he was criticized for his halfway measures, his pragmatism allowed him to move at the critical moment and both enroll blacks in the Union Army after the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation and to wage the Civil War as a vehicle for abolishing slavery instead of just limiting its expansion. Yet he continued to decline, even after victory, to take further steps demanded by the radicals and former abolitionists, such as insisting on the right to vote for the former slaves. In the same manner, Truman recognized Israel yet refused to lift the embargo, supply arms, or immediately grant full recognition. Yet, just as the radicals such as Frederick Douglass embraced Lincoln as a hero despite his limitations, so did most Zionists and the founders of Israel embrace Harry Truman.
Truman, if not Cyrus, was probably essential to Israel’s birth. Despite all of the reversals of his administration along the way, Eliahu Elath recognized the concrete steps Truman had taken that made Israel possible. They were, he wrote, “of truly historic significance” in the Zionist struggle for statehood: “His appeal to the British Government to grant a hundred thousand permits to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust to enter Palestine; his support for the Palestine Partition Plan with the inclusion of the Southern Negev and Elath within the Jewish State; United States recognition of the State of Israel upon its establishment; and the granting of the first international loan to be received by the Government of Israel.”33
Elath, like Weizmann and Ben-Gurion, would have differences with Truman in the period after recognition. They were not satisfied with the limits of his support. Truman did not move to end the arms embargo, even though the new state was attacked by five Arab armies. Truman was upset about reports of the plight of new Palestinian refugees and wanted more of them to be able to return to their homes. The State Department had been pressing him to force Israel to take back Arab Palestinian refugees, but the Israelis were reluctant to allow more than a small number to return. In their eyes, the only reason there were Arab refugees was that many Palestinian Arabs as well as the neighboring Arab countries had gone to war against their new state. Those who remained were welcome to stay, but the Israeli government worried that to allow all those who had fled to return would be to create a potential fifth column. This was of special concern because some of the Arab leaders were threatening another round of hostilities.
As a result of the creation of Israel and the war, an almost equal number of Jews had been forced out of the Arab countries as there had been Arab Palestinian refugees who fled Israel. Most of these new Jewish immigrants from the Arab lands arrived in Israel without money or resources, which they had been forced to leave behind. Israel had absorbed them and granted them citizenship. The Israeli leadership argued that the Arab countries should do likewise by admitting and integrating the Palestinians into their own societies. For the most part, the Arab states failed to do this, leaving many Palestinians living in refugee camps on the outskirts of their cities or in the West Bank and Gaza, sustained by international charity.
Ben-Gurion took the position that Israel would discuss repatriation and compensation for Arab refugees only within the context of peace treaty negotiations. But the Arab states insisted that Israel meet its repatriation and compensation demands before any negotiations took place and refused to engage in talks with Israel. Truman was disappointed that no provisions had been made for the refugees when the conflict officially ended with only the signing of armistice agreements.
Despite their differences with the Truman administration on the refugees and other issues, as time passed, most Israelis and their supporters understood the importance of what Harry S. Truman had done. As Weizmann observed about the Balfour Declaration, “Even if all the governments of the world gave us a country it would be a gift of words, but if the Jewish people will go and build Palestine, the Jewish state will become a reality and a fact.” And so they did. The new state, however, needed legitimacy and recognition for it to survive. It is fair to conclude as, David Niles did, that if FDR had lived and Truman not been president, there probably would not have been an Israel. Certainly, if Franklin D. Roosevelt had been in office, support at critical moments would most likely not have been offered. Without Truman, the new State of Israel might not have survived its first difficult years, and succeeded thereafter. For this, Truman will continue to be viewed as a hero in Israel and continue to have a place of honor in the history of the Jewish people.