3. The Crusade to Save a Jewish State

The terse telegram to the Jewish Agency for Palestine office in New York City, dispatched from Jerusalem on January 20, 1948, carried a note of urgency. Eliezer Kaplan, treasurer of the Agency since 1933, informed Henry Montor that “MYERSON PROCEEDING STATES WILLING HELP UJA NEEDS INCREASING HOPE YOUR FULL COOPERATION.” Currently executive vice chairman of the United Jewish Appeal (UJA), the forty-three-year-old Montor had met Kaplan a decade earlier during his first trip to the United States. As a response to the brutal assault against German and Austrian Jewry on Kristallnacht (November 9–10, 1938), engineered by Hitler’s government, the Agency treasurer successfully pressed at that time for a financial campaign whereby the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC, or “Joint” for short), created in 1914 to provide substantive help to Jews in Eastern Europe and the yishuv (Palestinian Jewish community) in the catastrophic wake of World War I, would share the results with the Agency by a distribution of eighty to twenty percent. Two months later, the newly created UJA linked the United Palestine Appeal (UPA), the JDC, and the National Refugee Service to provide relief for European Jews trapped in the vise of war, to sustain Jews living in British-mandated Palestine, and to facilitate German Jewish immigration to safer countries. The UJA drive achieved close to $14 million that year, a remarkable record that did not, however, increase substantially to meet the pressing needs of stricken Jewry abroad during the years of World War II and immediately thereafter.1

Formerly the assistant editor under Meyer Weisgal of New Palestine, the official organ of the Zionist Organization of America, and then publicity director and executive director of the UPA, the Nova Scotia-born Montor had also established the Independent Jewish Press Service and the Palcor News Agency to bring news abroad from the yishuv. In early 1939, he approached Weisgal, then confidant to World Zionist Organization (WZO) president Chaim Weizmann, about Jewish participation in the New York World’s Fair. The Jewish Palestine Pavilion, the first such exhibit at an international exposition in the United States, would attract record-breaking crowds, with an estimated total of more than two million visitors. Soon after V-E Day, at the request of Agency executive Moshe Shertok (later Sharett), Morgenthau committee chairman David Ben-Gurion, Montor used his UJA contacts to make possible the top Agency official’s meeting with some wealthy American Jews on July 1, 1945. This, in turn, led to the clandestine Sonneborn Institute and Materials for Palestine’s obtaining essential funds and particularly armaments, transferred overseas for the Hagana’s future struggle against the six surrounding Arab states.2

Montor’s well-deserved reputation as an aggressive fund raiser first achieved legendary status in 1946, when he spearheaded the UJA’s breakthrough appeal. A few JDC officials had come to him the previous summer, seeking approval for an independent campaign of at least $10 million in response to the fate of European Jewry during the Holocaust. In the face of their strong skepticism, he pressed for ten times that figure. At a preliminary conference in November 1945, the brief Yiddish speech of Joseph (“Yossel”) Rosensaft, who had just come out from the former Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to plead that fellow survivors get “a piece of bread,” proved especially effective. Dramatically removing a shirt to show where he had been whipped by Germans, recalled Sam Rothberg, he “tore the place apart”; Rosensaft’s cry “we shall not forget and will not forgive” deeply moved those present. The annual UJA meeting in Atlantic City the next month endorsed Montor’s charge, with the initial major gifts contributed by the Rosenwald, Mazer, and Leavitt families. The $100 million, a staggering figure in those times, was met.³

One year later, Montor scored his next major coup, recruiting Henry Morgenthau, Jr. to the UJA’s supreme executive rank. Secretary of the Treasury under President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), the dour Morgenthau (often referred to in Washington as “Henry the Morgue”), and his staff of experts had helped steer the country through the Great Depression and ably financed the war effort. Once aware of the State Department’s consistent obstruction of succor to the endangered Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe, Morgenthau had been instrumental in Roosevelt’s actually reluctant creation of the US War Refugee Board in January 1944. By then, he had fallen under Weizmann’s influence as well. However, his championing a demand that postwar Germany be stripped of its industry and converted into an agricultural nation, and especially Morgenthau’s wish to attend the postwar Potsdam Conference between Truman, Churchill, and Stalin and continue in the cabinet until victory against Japan were achieved, gained him no favor with Roosevelt’s successor. Harry S. Truman, wishing former Congressman and poker card partner Fred M. Vinson to replace Morgenthau, orchestrated his resignation in July 1945. Just prior to that denouement, Montor and Weisgal, thanks to the latter’s close connection with long-time Morgenthau secretary Henrietta Klotz, had played an important role in the Secretary’s interest to secure the appointment of Earl Harrison as Truman’s personal emissary to investigate the condition of Holocaust survivors in the so-called Displaced Persons (DP) camps. Montor quickly realized that the former Treasury Secretary could be a most valuable asset to the UJA. He tried, with Klotz’s encouragement and support, to have her boss become General Chairman of the organization, a steady attempt that ultimately succeeded and gave Morgenthau a life filled anew with purpose.4

Just back from a visit to the DP camps and Poland, Montor had proposed at the UJA’s meeting in Atlantic City on December 1, 1946, that the 1947 campaign be raised to $170 million. Some leading American Jews at the annual meeting strongly demanded that the UJA go back to “normal” and adopt a quota of $50 million. In what he would characterize as “the most violent and deeply-felt speech” of his career, Montor responded with extraordinary fury for over an hour that Sunday afternoon. Speaking to each leader in the room, he spoke of what they were proposing to do by abandoning European and Palestine Jewry. The meeting left him with more enemies that he had ever before accumulated, several never speaking to him again, but those in attendance ended with a quota of $125 million. Morgenthau, present as chairman of the Resolutions Committee although his father had died the same week, was touched. When the session closed, he said to Montor, “I am enlisting for the duration.”⁵

His days engaged once again, Morgenthau threw himself without reservation into the UJA post, regularly arriving at New York City headquarters on 165 West Forty-Sixth St. in the morning and leaving at the day’s end. He obtained a meeting of the UJA executive with Truman in February 1947 before its initial “big gifts” campaign began. Morgenthau’s daily conferences with staff, telephone calls across the country, reviews of publicity, and meetings with visiting community leaders impacted powerfully on many. His keynote addresses, some drafted by Montor, yielded $650,000 in one night in Dallas, moved Edgar Stern of New Orleans to double his announced gift to $250,000, and attained in Richmond, Atlanta, and Houston twice the big gift totals of 1946 for those communities. Soon thereafter, upon visiting five cities in three days, Morgenthau achieved totals far beyond the record achievements of 1946. His innovations included the open reading of pledge cards and the public announcement of the previous year’s gift. When chaplain Herbert A. Friedman’s eyewitness report of the hopeless life in a DP camp galvanized a lagging campaign in mid-1947, Morgenthau charted a DC-3 for the two of them to barnstorm a few cities every day, getting his former cabinet colleague, Secretary of War Robert Patterson, to approve Friedman’s staying in uniform before formal discharge from the US Army one month later. Morgenthau found a kindred spirit in Montor’s relentless demands, iron will, and charisma, as well as the younger man’s inability to compromise and a fierce commitment to Jewish independence in Eretz Israel. In the next three years, thanks to Morgenthau’s great prestige and Montor’s energetic drive, joined to American Jewry’s new feeling of determined solidarity with its European roots, the UJA would raise an extraordinary figure: $465 million.6

At the request of Agency executive Moshe Shertok (later Sharett), Morgenthau also asked Major General John H. Hilldring, then the State Department’s Assistant Secretary for Occupied Territories and a close friend of Secretary of State George C. Marshall, if it were possible for the Jewish Agency to present its case officially at the UN. The Arab nations “are in there every day crapping all over the Jews and there is nobody to answer them,” he noted. State preferred, however, that both the Agency and the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee appear on an equal footing before a small committee, rather than the Agency’s having a nonvoting membership in the General Assembly. Hearing this from Hilldring, Morgenthau observed that public opinion thought it not “a sporting thing” that the Arabs “have everything their way.” At the same time, he thought it advisable that the Agency delegates not go “into a court where they have got to abide by its decision and the other fellow does not.” In the end, the UN’s First Committee resolved to grant a hearing to both and to any other organization “representative of a considerable element of the population of Palestine.”7

As for Goldie Myerson, Montor was aware that she directed the Agency’s political department once Shertok had left Palestine in early 1947 to lead the World Zionist Organization’s drive at the United Nations for a Jewish state in Palestine. She had filled in for him briefly when the British imprisoned Shertok and other Agency leaders after Operation Agatha (“Black Sabbath” in the yishuv’s terminology) on June 29, 1946. He knew something about the Kyev-born woman, whose youth had been spent in Milwaukee before settling in 1921 with her husband in the Jezre’el Valley’s Kibbutz Merhavia, later becoming an executive member of the Histadrut trade union and subsequently that of the Mapai labor party and of the Agency itself. Her evocative appeal, made as a Histadrut representative to the 1938 Evian Conference on Refugees, for Jewish sovereignty following the dismal close of that international meeting had elicited a few newspaper headlines. In March 1946, her testimony impressed the Anglo-American Committee on Palestine, with its call for Jews, as other peoples of the world, “to be masters of their own fate,” to create in Palestine a free Jewish society based on mutual cooperation throughout the country and with all their neighbors. Myerson had come to America and England a few times in the nineteen thirties, speaking as secretary of the Histadrut’s Women’s Labor Council to its sister organization abroad, Pioneer Women. Yet in Montor’s view she had been “an impecunious, unimportant representative, a ‘schnorrer’ for various little funds,” such as the selling of shares for a Histadrut company and building a port in Tel-Aviv. During these visits, she stayed as a guest in people’s homes; hotels were too expensive. In the United States, he reasonably concluded at the time, Myerson was an unknown.⁸

On January 22, Montor cabled Myerson directly. Joining him in the reply was Isidor Coons, the main fund raiser for the JDC and a more retiring personality with whom he enjoyed an understanding relationship. Their telegram read thus:⁹

ON BEHALF ALL OFFICERS UNITED JEWISH APPEAL WE EXTEND CORDIAL INVITATION YOU VISIT UNITED STATES UNDER EXCLUSIVE AUSPICES UJA WE URGENTLY NEED YOUR HELP IN CAMPAIGN AND STONGLY REQUEST YOUR ACCEPTANCE BY RETURN CABLE WOULD BE MOST HELPFUL TO KNOW ARRIVAL DATE AND LENGTH OF VISIT SO IMPORTANT FUNCTIONS CAN BE ARRANGED THROUGHOUT COUNTRY

Montor was unaware that Myerson herself had urged the Agency executive to have Kaplan cable him, a development that had begun in war-torn Palestine some weeks earlier. The day after the UN General Assembly voted on November 29, 1947, to recommend the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, the more than 1 million Arabs in the country launched a civil war. The mandatory government’s casualty list for that December included the killing of 204 Jews, while the Arab world immovably rejected the yishuv’s appeal for compromise and its claim to sovereignty. Excoriating the mandatory authorities for not distinguishing between attackers and those attacked, Ben-Gurion declared that Palestinian Jewry would defend itself and the frontiers of the Jewish nation in this “savage war against our very existence.” Yet he had to contend with an unavoidable reality: artillery, tanks, armored cars, and combat aircraft were all lacking. Ammunition for Hagana ranks was also in short supply, some fifty rounds per rifle and six to seven hundred rounds per machine gun. Huge sums of cash had to be obtained quickly if Ehud Ueberall (later Avriel), Tuvya Arazi, and others engaged in the purchase abroad of heavy weaponry were to succeed in waging the decisive battles soon to be fought for statehood. When Kaplan wired Ben-Gurion from New York on December 3 that the Keren Kayemet L’Yisrael (Jewish National Fund), exclusively focused since 1901 on the purchase of land in Palestine, should loan the Agency $3 million in this emergency, the Agency executive chairman responded angrily: He could not do this when Kaplan’s office refused to do anything in the area “where the life of the yishuv and even our entire future lay in the balance.”10

In mid-December, Myerson made scant headway in pressing High Commissioner Alan Cunningham to permit the Jewish Supernumerary Police to make use of armored cars on the roads against lethal Arab attack, especially on the Tel-Aviv road to besieged Jerusalem, or to discontinue police searches for Hagana arms and arrests of Hagana members on defense duty. Nor did she find an attentive ear when observing to US Consul Robert Macatee that the imposition of an arms embargo as of December 5 by the pro-Arab US State and War Departments favored the Palestinian Arabs, who were obtaining weapons from the nearby states even as 10,000 volunteer Arab guerillas poured across the borders into the country with little British intervention. The State Department’s Near Eastern Division looked askance at Kaplan’s request to support the Agency’s approach to the Export-Import Bank seeking an initial $100 million for its four-year plan of resettlement and development, just when Ben-Gurion wired Kaplan on the 14th that the acquisition of weapons was “now matter of life and death,” urging that £300,000 be sent without delay. On the 26th, an Arab ambush in Bab-el-Wad on a Jerusalem-bound convoy, whose weapons had been confiscated earlier by the British, killed seven, including Youth Aliya’s acting director Hans Beyth. Myerson miraculously escaped harm on that trip. She gained no sympathy, however, in an interview three days later with the imperturbable Chief Secretary Henry Gurney. The following day, Ben-Gurion heard that Kaplan had arranged a $7.5 million bank loan at 2.5 percent, but the Agency treasurer’s hope for another $5 million from private individuals, each giving $50,000, seemed uncertain.11

For Ben-Gurion, the next step was clear. On the last day of 1947, speaking to his executive colleagues in Tel-Aviv, he surveyed the dire situation. Another convoy in which Myerson and associates Yitshak Gruenbaum and Eliyahu Dobkin, along with Va’ad HaLe’umi president Yitshak Ben-Zvi, were traveling from Jerusalem to Tel-Aviv had been searched by British soldiers, all weapons confiscated, and later shot at by Arabs. The need for more than 30,000 draftees until the British declared exit on May 15, 1948, would cost £3 million and another £2 million for weaponry. Only in the US might these funds be attained, but a UJA drive for hopefully $200 million (£50 million) could not be available before next year. Essential weapons had to reach the yishuv during the next two months, paid for in hard cash to expedite matters. Under the circumstances, if no other solution could be found in Palestine, he was prepared to go to America for this purpose. The same day, Ben-Gurion released a press statement that the yishuv had to focus on its defense, the establishment of the Jewish state on May 15, and the boundaries—including the isolated Negev—accorded it by the General Asssembly vote of November 29. It would not recoil from any effort, suffering, and sacrifice in this war of defense until victory, which would come. He concluded: These were “the birth pangs of Medinat Yisrael and her redemption, and we would receive them with love, faith, and dedication.”12

The threat to Ben-Gurion’s aspirations did not abate in the next two weeks. On New Year’s Day 1948 he learned that the Arab League had budgeted £6 million for the imminent war. King Abdullah of Transjordan, although promising Myerson in their secret meeting on November 17, 1947, that he would support a Jewish state if obtaining the area assigned to the Palestinian Arabs in the General Assembly recommendation, pledged that he would “lend” his British-trained and heavily armed Arab Legion to the League in the coming invasion of Palestine. Two days later, a special meeting on security accepted a recommendation by Myerson, back in Tel-Aviv after staying in Gedera to secure the release of a Hagana female warrior involved in the December 31 convoy, that the Agency office in New York give $1 million to Arazi, with Hagana finance director Levi Skolnik (later Eshkol) to prepare a list of yishuv institutions and individuals who would lend £2 million to its war effort. Kaplan, soon to return home, hoped that he would have $10 million from England, Canada, and the United States in a few days’ time, but not all would be for armaments. The mandatory resolved to allow but two licensed guns on each Egged public bus; searches of Jewish vehicles would continue. Another setback occurred when a Hagana shipment of twenty-six cases containing an estimated 65,000 pounds of TNT, along with fifty-one cases ready for shipment on the same vessel to Jewish firms in Palestine, had been discovered accidentally by the FBI, leading to the seizure of fifty-nine tons of war surplus explosives heading for shipment from New Jersey and New York warehouses to the yishuv. Up to January 11, a total of 150 Jews were officially reported to have been killed in Jerusalem, and at least 350 known to have sustained injuries. All the while, reports swirled about that Whitehall and the British military chiefs, like their American counterparts, were seeking to overturn the UN’s partition decision, one scheme even advocating that the Arab Legion take over all of Palestine and the yishuv’s cities and settlements given autonomous status.¹³

On January 12, Ben-Gurion heard from Kaplan, now back in Palestine, that $5.2 million was required immediately for arms purchases in Europe. Perhaps the yishuv could raise £2–3 million, but at least £7 million was needed from abroad, primarily in America. Resolving that the two of them had to travel there, an adamant Ben-Gurion decided to bring the matter to the Agency executive, sitting in Tel Aviv, on the morrow. Myerson, however, thought his offer to travel to the United States was out of the question. Ben-Gurion’s presence in Palestine at this critical hour could not be denied. She offered to undertake the task, arguing that her services in Palestine could certainly be dispensed with for a few weeks. In addition, she spoke English fluently. It would also give her respite from fruitless talks with Gurney, who had the previous night again accused her and the Agency of “deception, suspicion, chauvinism,” and of consorting with the dissident Irgun and Stern right-wing underground forces. Insisting on a vote of those present that evening, her arguments fell on the receptive ears of colleagues “so tired and harassed.” The laconic entry in Ben-Gurion’s diary entry told the result: “It was decided on Golda’s trip to America.”14

She would not depart for the United States in another nine days’ time. During that interval, a Hagana force sent from Jerusalem to relieve the beleaguered kibbutz Kfar Etzion was discovered on January 16 five kilometers from its objective. After a battle that lasted seven hours against hundreds of armed Arabs who descended from the surrounding hills, the entire relief force of thirty-five under the command of Danny Mass, having run out of bullets, began throwing stones at their attackers, was massacred, their bodies brutally mutilated and stripped by the local villagers. British forces, which had made no effort to stop the fighting, later transferred the dead for a communal burial in Kfar Etzion. At the same time, London announced that His Majesty’s Government would honor its treaty pledges of sending considerable armaments to Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan. On January 20, eight Jews were killed in Yehiam, and seven Jewish Supernumerary Policemen murdered who were not permitted to use armored cars out of their neighborhood near Yazur on the 22nd. Yet United Kingdom representative at the United Nations Alexander Cadogan declared to the UN Commission on Palestine that the violence in that country was due to the Jews, while mandatory Undersecretary John Fletcher-Cooke added that the Jews would have to withdraw to the coastal plain from Tel-Aviv to Haifa after the fighting subsided.¹⁵

With Montor’s reply in hand on January 22, Myerson set off that morning for the long flight to New York City. Aware then only of his reputation, that he was “a great power and did great things,” she knew not one individual either among the UJA and JDC hierarchy. More than a decade had passed since her last visit to the States. The growing despair and pessimism felt by many Palestinian Jews, especially after the slaughter of Mass’s Hagana patrol, also rested on her shoulders. Yet the fifty-year-old woman, far more militant politically than the moderate Kaplan, held Ben-Gurion’s trust. Myerson also possessed what she later called the yishuv’s secret weapon: ein breira (“no alternative”). One night earlier, Ben-Gurion had discussed with her what to do in America, and to instruct Arazi to purchase jeeps, bazooka-type guns, speedy motor boats, corvettes, and even an aircraft carrier, and to report by cable each week about his activities. The destiny of the 600,000 members of the yishuv appeared to rest on this emergency mission, perhaps a fool’s errand, its end anything but certain.16

Myerson’s overriding objective to win the hearts and pockets of American Jewry began at a moment that could hardly have been less propitious. She arrived at LaGuardia airport on January 23 in one of the worst blizzards New York City had ever known, more than a foot of snow blanketing the area. The metropolis was cut off, no trains or planes available beyond its borders. Montor was in Chicago for the sixteenth annual General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds. Her sister, Clara, head of the Bridgeport Jewish Federation, suggested when they met at the airport that she travel to that conclave. Yet Montor, to whom Myerson quickly conveyed the idea by telephone, was dubious. The conferees were not Zionists in the main, and the officials from Chicago themselves had objected strenuously to his UJA goals for 1946 and 1947. She stayed overnight at the Brooklyn home of her niece, the married daughter of her sister Sheyna who was still in America because of recent surgery. While Golda, Clara, and Sheyna talked through the night, Montor contacted Council executive director Harry Lurie, who turned down Myerson’s desire to address the gathering as “a partisan thing.” So did Sidney Hollander, past Council president. He then pressed Harry Goldenberg of Minneapolis, vicepresident of the Council and chairman of the UJA national cabinet, along with a few other Zionists at the assembly, and arranged a spot for her to speak during the Sunday program. Stanley Myers of Miami, the Council president, sent off a warm invitation. A sudden break in the weather on Saturday enabled Myerson to get a plane the next day to Chicago. She walked into the Sheraton Hotel on January 25, “shaking,” with “no idea of what was going to happen.”17

Montor “took to her at once,” he subsequently recalled. Myerson’s features, her face, her political sincerity, her “very homeliness” made the Agency’s political director, in his opinion, the ideal speaker for the “state-in-being.” Her first message to the Jews of America was scheduled for delivery at the Council’s business meeting after lunch. Following reports of the credentials committee, the budget and dues schedule, and the presentation of exhibit awards, Myers presented Myerson that afternoon as “our distinguished guest,” an “extraordinary personality” who had played a role of “high statesmanship” in the destiny of Jewish Palestine in this “transitory period.” Having “eminently carried the burdens of governmental problems in the most difficult period of the Jewish Homeland,” he went on, she “epitomizes the courage and faith of the Jewish People in Palestine.” Recently escaped from an Arab ambush, she appeared now with a message from “the greatest battlefront of Jewish survival today.” He ended with these words: “I am happy now to introduce a splendid representative of her sex, a brilliant statesman of her people and an intrepid fighter for the freedom of Israel.” Rising from their chairs, the delegates received the sudden invitee with prolonged applause.¹⁸

For thirty-five minutes, Myerson proceeded to speak without notes. The yishuv’s heroic youth, many in their teens, had no alternative but to fight against the war forced upon it by the ex-Grand Mufti of Palestine (Haj Amin al-Husseini) and his men, she began. “We can stand our ground” against them, the aid they receive from Arab states, and British policy that “for all practical purposes” helps the Arabs. The 300 people in the four settlements of the Etzion bloc northwest of Hevron had recently fought back an attack of 1,000 Arabs. Telling the fate of the thirty-five who were killed nine days earlier after more than a seven-hour battle in their attempt to come to the aid of Kfar Etzion, she declared that the Jewish community in Palestine would fight to the end. Jewry had lost 6,000,000 Jews in the Holocaust years, and it would be “audacity” on the yishuv’s part to worry the Jewish people worldwide because a few hundred thousand more Jews were in danger. Rather, if Palestine’s Jews could remain alive, then “the Jewish people as such is alive and Jewish independence is assured.” Otherwise, “we are through” for many centuries with the dream of a Jewish people and a Jewish homeland. Every Jew in Palestine believed that the yishuv would finally be victorious, she added, although aware that the price of life to pay would be high—over three hundred killed by now, with no doubt that “there will be more.”

The valiant spirit of their youth would not falter, Myerson continued, but it could not alone face rifles and machine guns. A special campaign within the yishuv had raised almost $6.5 million, and soon another $2 million campaign would begin, augmenting taxes on various articles that bring in $320,000 a month. With the exception of a few babies from one settlement, not a single person left the isolated Negev settlements. Men and women have lined up for hours in order to give blood for the wounded. The time factor was most important: millions of dollars had to be obtained immediately, she emphasized, the sum of between $25 and $30 million in cash within a couple of weeks. The battle was being waged as well for those not yet in the country, including the 30,000 “illegal” immigrants detained by the British in Cyprus camps and hundreds of thousands more, and the yishuv had to be prepared to absorb them. While Palestine’s Arabs had the nearby Arab states, the “only hinterland that we have is you.” She believed that the Jews of the United States would realize the current peril, and do what they had to do. Paraphrasing Churchill’s thrilling speech in June 1940 when England appeared alone to face Hitler’s armed juggernaut, she asserted that the yishuv would fight in the Negev, in the Galilee, and on the outskirts of Jerusalem until the very end.

The yishuv would raise no white flag to the former Grand Mufti, she closed, but the approximately one thousand leaders present and their communities could decide whether it or Haj Amin al-Husseini would be victorious. Do not be late, Myerson begged her listeners, and “bitterly sorry” three months from now for what you failed to do today. Yet she was leaving this platform “without any doubt in my mind or my heart.” The decision of American Jewry would be similar to that which had been taken by their counterpart in Eretz Israel, “so that within a few months from now we all can participate again not only in the joy of a decision being taken upon the establishment of a Jewish State,” but in “the joy of the laying of the foundation, the cornerstone of the Jewish State, knowing that every one of us, we there, and you here, have given of our best to make this dream become a reality.”19

Spontaneously, the audience rose as one to its feet, some in the cavernous hall weeping openly. A recent biography ably captured the electric atmosphere that filled the hotel ballroom: “In her plain black dress, without a speck of makeup, her hair austerely parted in the middle and pulled tightly back, she seemed to some like a woman out of the Bible.” “She had swept the whole conference,” marveled Montor years later at this unique performance. The Dallas delegation, hardly a hotbed of Zionist sentiment, immediately retired to caucus, and then declared that they were going back to Texas to “get so much money that they won’t know what to do with it.” Loans would have to be taken in the bank, paid off later from the funds collected—so be it. Others present followed its lead, “firebrands,” in Montor’s phrase, who meant to light up every community they represented.²⁰

The next day, Myerson returned to New York. After reporting in the morning to the American section of the Jewish Agency executive, she went to a press conference that Shertok had arranged for her at Lake Success, where UN headquarters were temporarily located in the Sperry Gyroscope plant twenty miles east of the city in northwest Long Island. Excoriating British “neutrality” for actually aiding Arab attacks, she made the yishuv’s stand clear: “If we are killed, at least we are killed as law-abiding citizens” who, besides defending their lives and what they had created in Palestine, had been to first implement the decision of the United Nations, which they had accepted “in good faith.” The minute Arab aggression stopped, “there will be peace in Palestine.” The Jewish community there would eventually be victorious, she averred, sustained by hope that “independence and a Jewish State in Palestine” will arise “before the end of a short period.” The arming and recognition of a legally recognized Jewish militia was essential, together with an international force representing the entire UN to prove by its very appearance to the ex-Grand Mufti and the Arab States that the will of the vast majority of the United Nations “shall be done.” The time factor was crucial, these steps ultimately to bring peace. All of Palestine’s inhabitants would benefit thereby, Myerson was certain, she asserting that “masses” of Arabs would like to settle down in the Jewish State, whose new government would seek as one of its first obligations to raise their standard of life in health, housing, and education. Hearing this, Harold Beeley, the pro-Arab advisor on Palestine matters to Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, concluded that her appeal in effect for US military intervention in favor of the Jews and playing off America against Great Britain could only cause satisfaction to one major power: Soviet Russia.21

Montor had “jumped the gun” in proposing to his UJA associates that the 1948 appeal be set at $170 million, with a substantial portion of funds collected to go for Myerson’s clarion call to arm the yishuv without delay. His focus on the centrality of the Palestine issue rather than the UJA’s past emphasis on Jewish needs in Europe, a theme which Weizmann trumpeted when addressing UJA audiences at this time, won him many adversaries, such as the upright Pabst Brewery head Harris Pearlstein, chairman of its Allocations Committee. When the Administrative Committee, with Morgenthau presiding, met at Montor’s request to hear Myerson present her case to them for the first time, former UJA national chairman and JDC executive William Rosenwald warned that any UJA involvement in raising money for weapons would destroy everything that it had built up through the years. “I have the greatest sympathy with Palestine and I certainly want it to be stronger,” he continued. Speaking very forcefully and without stuttering in his usual manner when he had not spent a lot of time practicing a speech, Rosenwald’s sincerity and effective arguments persuaded many who were sitting around the table. As he spoke, Montor saw tears rolling down Myerson’s face. She knew that Rosenwald was a very powerful personality in the American Jewish community and certainly in the affairs of the United Jewish Appeal. It seemed that her mission was doomed.

At that critical moment, Morgenthau, no orator or philosopher, made what Montor later considered “the greatest statement” that he had ever heard from the usually stolid fifty-seven-year-old Jew of German ancestry. Turning directly to Rosenwald, he asserted in effect that he could not accept what “Bill” was saying. Feeling just as deeply about America as you, I tried to serve my country, he declared. But the United Jewish Appeal was here for the purpose of saving the Jewish people, and we could not save the Jewish people unless the Jews in Palestine, who were trying to defend themselves against murderers, were able to defend themselves. That is what the UJA is all about, Morgenthau concluded, and if Myerson said they have to have weapons and we are the only place where they can get the money to buy the arms, “then I am afraid, Bill, that you will have to accept my decision. We are going to include Myerson and her request in this year’s campaign.” That is how the meeting ended. Myerson was “overjoyed.” There was no formal decision, but Morgenthau had his way.22

Nor did Myerson’s plain-spoken, rousing appeal in Chicago sit well at first with JDC headquarters in New York City. Paul Baerwald, one of its founders and currently Honorary Chairman, had just submitted a memorandum to his colleagues advocating that they “husband our resources” and realize that, in light of the UN partition decision in favor of a Jewish state, the success of the 1948 campaign would be more difficult to predict. The “Joint” did not know on what basis the Jewish Agency determined the priority of the financial demands made on it for so many different purposes, nor what plans they had to meet these demands. Given that for the next few months there would be “a definite acute practical cash problem,” he wondered why the Agency did not approach such organizations as the American Jewish Committee, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), Hadassah, and the American Jewish Congress. “We owe it to ourselves,” Baerwald concluded, “to look at this question from the broadest possible viewpoint.” Montor sought to have the JDC accelerate payments to the UPA out of the 1947 UJA collections, and Myerson telephoned to request an appointment with Edward Warburg, its chairman, but nothing conclusive resulted.²³

As Myerson “did not have a dime,” Montor brought her in a taxi to the office of Moe Leavitt, the JDC’s executive director, on January 28. Leavitt’s first reaction brought a sudden dose of reality: The UJA was a philanthropic organization which by no manner of means could become involved in a fund for obtaining weapons for the yishuv. In addition, he asked, if all the money collected were to go to that war effort, what would be the JDC’s financial share in this emergency campaign? The “Joint,” after all, was committed to helping Jews in great need throughout the world. Ultimately, after three days of intensive talks between Myerson, Montor, and the JDC Administration Committee, it was agreed to approach thirty to forty of the larger Jewish communities throughout the country with a push to convert into cash “accelerated” collections on account of 1947 UJA pledges, to advance contributions on account of the 1948 campaign, and to seek bank loans. The JDC would receive half of the monies collected, the other half going to the UPA, with the drive to cease on March 1. Since Myerson sought at least $25 million, the special UJA campaign to meet the emergency in Palestine would now be set at $50 million. JDC Board of Directors’ member and investment banker Harold Linder, who immediately reached an understanding in the matter with the Chase National Bank and the Central Hanover Bank and Trust Company, would accompany Myerson to a number of key cities for this purpose. Myerson soon cabled Ben-Gurion of the JDC’s “full support,” noting that “without which action impossible.”24

On February 4, after Myerson addressed the UJA executive in the presence of Morgenthau and Linder, a telegram was drafted to all members urging “as substantial a cash advance as you can make” within the next forty-eight hours towards the $10 million that had to be raised in New York within ten days. A list of the individuals in the industrial field who had already sent checks with sizeable contributions was attached, with the “dire need of cash” made clear. Two days later, a letter from Baerwald and JDC vice chairman I. Edwin Goldwasser informed leading American Jews of the emergency campaign for $50 million. Time clearly was of the essence, especially as the UN Palestine Commission’s first monthly report, which had just indicted Great Britain in effect for circumventing the partition resolution, failed to make a single recommendation. The same report stated that “powerful Arab interests” were deliberately attempting to “alter by force” the General Assembly’s November resolution, and urged that the Security Council provide an international armed force soon if the Commission were to be enabled to implement that resolution and maintain law and order in Palestine when the British transferred authority to it.²⁵

By February 9, Leavitt could report to the JDC staff that Myerson and Linder had visited Newark and Baltimore, followed by a trip to Boston and Miami, and that the response to requests for immediate cash had been “most gratifying.” In addition, Dallas had already sent in $500,000 and Milwaukee a like amount, the latter to forward an additional such amount shortly. Cincinnati and St. Louis were next on the Myerson-Linder trail. A meeting of large givers and campaign leaders would be held two days later at New York City’s Biltmore Hotel to hear Myerson. Thereafter, it was planned to solicit about 1,200 of the biggest givers for advance cash contributions toward 1948 and balances on 1947 pledges. There was “a most favorable reaction to this intensified campaign,” he informed the group, with everyone involved feeling that it would act as a “worthwhile stimulus” probably resulting in higher contributions for 1948 and accelerating the 1947 payments on pledges. During the first six months of 1947, total receipts of UJA on accounts of 1946 and 1947 had totaled $46 million. With the special effort now to obtain $50 million quickly in cash, and possibly another $20 million coming in from communities not included in the acceleration scheme, it was probable that $97 million would be received in the first six months of this year. Much would depend, Leavitt concluded, on the UJA “hammering away” to get as many pledges as possible.26

The outlines of the $50 million drive were formally announced the next day in a telephone conference with twenty-five of the largest cities, addressed by Myerson, New York State’s Governor Herbert Lehman, and Morgenthau, with Council president Myers in attendance. When championing the $250 million UJA objective for 1948 at the recent conference in Atlantic City, Lehman had declared that Palestine’s Jews should be “given the means to protect themselves” against overt Arab aggression intended to contravene the UN partition vote. He now “wholeheartedly” endorsed Myerson’s plea, telling listeners that “we are on the threshold of a new era in Jewish life—an era that can bring the end of Jewish homelessness—an era that may mark the beginning of the end of Jewish misery and sorrow.” At the close of the two-hour program at New York’s WNEW Studios, Morgenthau stressed that “we dare not lose this fight,” and that we, with the help of American Jewry and the Jews of Palestine “will be victorious.” He immediately authorized a survey, conducted via former War Production Board planning committee chairman Robert Nathan, a committed Zionist now heading an economic consulting firm, in connection with the raising of funds in the country for Palestine’s development. Not long thereafter, Morgenthau dispatched a letter to leaders in cities not covered by the WNEW broadcast, concluding thus: “Jewish lives depend on immediate action. Speed is urgent.”²⁷

New York City’s effort on behalf of the year’s national UJA campaign was launched the very next day. Some 2,500 community leaders convened at the annual Women’s Division rally held at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Speakers included FDR widow Eleanor Roosevelt, Lehman, liberal columnist Max Lerner, and Mrs. Jerome I. Udell, chairman of the Women’s Division in the 1948 drive. Mrs. Roosevelt, a member of the US delegation to the United Nations, told the gathering that “we must ask our government to allow the importation of arms into Palestine and to raise its embargo.” The Arab leaders, she added, “have done themselves a great harm in saying that they would fight a decision of the United Nations.”28

Morgenthau’s intervention proved crucial when accompanying Myerson, along with Montor, Rothberg, and Goldenberg, for a whirlwind visit in his first trip to Miami. A breakfast meeting and a luncheon went very well, and then the group flew to Miami Beach for another presentation in its biggest hotel. Although the building was owned by a Jew, fund raising was forbidden there. Coming down to the beautiful patio and seeing the guests so elegantly dressed, she froze. While drinking black coffee and smoking her cigarettes, Myerson began to cry. One thought crossed her mind: “How could I, in this beautiful atmosphere, tell what is happening at home?” I am sure, she told Montor, that when I get up to talk, they will all walk out. “I understand perfectly how you feel,” Morgenthau interrupted. “I will get up, never mind what the manager of the hotel said about not having any fund raising here, and say ‘Friends, you’re here on a vacation which you deserve. Nobody has the right to trouble you, and since I don’t want to keep you here under a false pretense, I have to tell you that we intend to do business tonight. Anybody that wants to walk out, we’ll do nothing against them; you can just get up and walk out.’” He proceeded to speak. No one left the room. That evening, about $1.5 million in cash was raised, to be the highlight of her many trips across the country. “I think we ended that day in Miami with about four or five million dollars,” the yishuv visitor subsequently recalled.²⁹

That same month, Montor arranged for a TWA plane, with the UJA “Star of Hope” emblazoned on it, to pick up thirty-five major Jewish leaders in various cities. The group then went on a tour of European and Palestinian communities. The trip spread over a four week period and garnered much publicity. At a meeting in the Vatican, Pope Pius XII gave his blessing to their $250 million “Destiny Drive.” When the group returned home, they participated in “The Flying Caravans” at functions across the United States. In their new capacity as organizers and speakers, they proved to be highly effective solicitors. This select group thereby became “one more link in the American Jewish communal chain,” which, thanks to Montor’s unique gifts of ingenuity and temerity, brought the UJA to record achievements.³⁰

On February 24, a two-day national conference in Washington, DC set in motion the $250 million UJA national campaign for overseas relief and Palestine needs. Aiming for $50 million in cash within the next ten days for the yishuv emergency, keynote speaker Morgenthau dubbed this the “Ten Days of Decision.” Neither a Jewish state in Palestine nor peace would be possible if the UN failed, he averred, and he hoped that American Jewry would have the “backbone and the stamina” to help realize the Jewish dream of centuries. Saying that President Truman regarded the UJA campaign as “one of the most important undertakings that any group ever embarked upon,” Attorney General Tom Clark compared Palestine’s Jewish settlers with the early American pioneers, and expressed the view that “the troubles that now best this new Jewish state set up through the UN will soon be overcome.” A Jewish commonwealth would not only help reduce “the problem of the homeless and displaced Jews in Europe,” Warburg declared, but also benefit millions of others by expanding industry, agriculture, and opportunity in the Middle East. UPA national chairman Israel Goldstein went further, charging that much larger resources in the form of government grants would be needed for “the settlement of a million Jews in Palestine,” but it was important that the Jews themselves should be the first to respond.31

Was $50 million in such a short time remotely realistic? Gottlieb Hammer, who was then acting as comptroller of the Jewish Agency’s New York City headquarters with full power of attorney on Kaplan’s behalf, cabled Kaplan on February 14 that “prospects indicate” the UPA would receive $15 million, possibly $20 million. Years later, the yishuv’s emissary to the United States in those critical weeks confided the JDC officials’ belief that the agreed upon amount “was ‘nuts’ anyhow,” that they would not even get $25 million. Myerson felt at the time, however, that it made no difference: “we might as well ask” for double that figure. Montor, she added, thought that perhaps $10 to $12 million would be collected. Yet he worked very hard, preparing before each community visit a list with the Council of Jewish Federations of how much they could ask for. Stalwarts from the JDC and UJA executive ranks besides Montor who often joined these trips included Warburg, Rosenwald, and Rothberg. While she crisscrossed the United States, from coast to coast, with every day in a different city, they could not keep up with that demanding schedule. Her companions changed off, but the pace never slackened. Myerson was a woman possessed.³²

Already by February 10, Gideon Ruffer (later Rafael), a member of the Agency delegation to the UN, could report to a colleague in Tel-Aviv that Myerson was going “from strength to strength and from million to million.” Given this mission, which had “no equal in importance,” he and associates were delighted in her success at winning the hearts and opening the pockets “to a degree hitherto indescribable.” The same day, just when Ben-Gurion informed his security committee that the yishuv “might be able to stand up to the Arab armies” if it could hold on for two to three months until essential weapons arrived, Myerson wired him that $15 million had been obtained, with at least $20 million likely to be guaranteed by the month’s end. The situation in Palestine had greatly worsened, he immediately replied, the armies of the Arab states far better equipped and financed at present than the yishuv. Palestine’s Jewish community would be under siege very soon, with some “islands” of settlement, particularly the Negev, as well as the Upper Galilee and Jerusalem, cut off. Other than the detailed list of armaments and other pressing needs which were attached to the letter, he asked that $1.5 million be immediately sent for the purchase of a boat to rush a delivery of the weapons so desperately sought.33

The increasingly grave situation prompted Ben-Gurion to cable Shertok on February 12 that “serious attacks” were likely from the welltrained and equipped Arab bands invading across Palestine’s northern and eastern frontiers, assisted by mainly German technicians. The next six weeks were “extremely critical if not fateful,” as “goods” from Ueberall and Arazi could only be expected at best after six to eight weeks. He urged the immediate arrival of an international force or at least the dispatch of military equipment by the UN or the United States, a demand which Agency representative in Washington Eliyahu Epstein (later Elath) lost no time in sending to Marshall, the UN Palestine Commission, and the members of the Security Council. The Secretary of State, however, gave no encouragement to Eleanor Roosevelt’s personal letter seeking that the arms embargo be lifted, with the Jews and any UN police force to be equipped with modern armaments as “the only thing which will hold the Arabs in check.” Both Jews and Arabs were committing acts of terror, Marshall replied. Moreover, her suggestions would lead to further bloodshed, and the problem should be approached through the UN rather than unilaterally. When soon asked at a press conference on February 19 if the United States would continue to support partition, Marshall replied thus: “The whole Palestine matter “is under consideration.”34

The descent into further killing and chaos in the biblically covenanted Promised Land did not allow, however, for tempered deliberation. While Goldenberg could inform the Council of Jewish Federations executive committee that $17 million in cash had already been sent in by February 23, with over $40 million pledged, an attack one day earlier aided by some British deserters and orchestrated by local Palestinian commander Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini in Jerusalem’s densely populated Ben Yehuda Street had killed fifty-eight people, almost all civilians, and seriously wounded thirty-two more. The same day, His Majesty’s Government announced that it would block Palestine’s sterling balances of about £100 million, thus curtailing Jewish imports from sterling area countries, as well as causing avoidable credit stringency and thus a probable rise in the domestic cost of living. The yishuv would emerge victorious against the Arab forces provided that weapons arrived before May 15, Ben-Gurion wired Shertok on February 27, but that remained unsure, even as Hagana intelligence possessed proof that the British in Palestine were recruiting for the Arab Legion. The next day, after a British constable and three Arabs in uniform entered the Hagana position at the HaYotzek factory opposite Holon and confiscated all weapons, Arabs who had gathered outside immediately opened fire: eight Hagana men were killed and “subsequently butchered.”³⁵

Nor did this deadly pace slacken in the first two weeks of March. Entering Palestine on the 6th with a large, well-armed contingent, former military leader in the Arab Revolt (1936–1939) and pro-Nazi collaborator Fawzi al-Kaukji announced that the Arab Liberation Army was fighting for “the annihilation of the Zionists,” a phrase Haj Amin repeated in declaring that the Arabs would continue fighting “until the Zionists were annihilated and the whole of Palestine became a purely Arab state.” At a meeting the following day of the UJA Administration Committee, at which Morgenthau announced that cash contributions to meet the emergency developments in Palestine would reach the $50 million mark by the early part of the next week, Myerson warned that the Jews in Palestine “are fighting a war of survival… which they must fight to a victorious end to save their a lives and homes as well as to safeguard the rights of the homeless Jews of Europe find a home in the Jewish state in the Palestine future.” On February 11, an Arab explosion partially wrecked the Jewish Agency headquarters in Jerusalem, killed ten people and wounded ninety others.36

The same morning, Myerson departed LaGuardia airport for Tel-Aviv. Ending her five-week American tour the previous day at a dinner meeting with a group of outstanding Washington newsmen and radio correspondents, she declared that attempted conciliation with the Arabs at this time would result only in strengthening their resistance to the UN decision on partition, since they regarded the lack of firm action by the UN as encouragement to proceed with violence. If Haj Amin were removed from the scene, she went on, influential Arabs now terrorized by his Arab Higher Committee would come forward for negotiation; non-aggression pacts had been concluded even now between Jewish and Arab villages in Palestine. The British, she charged, far from practicing the impartiality which they continuously professed regarding the implementation of partition, had helped to arm Arab guards, let the Arab Legion remain in Palestine, and replenish the Arab war budget by a long-deferred payment of $1.2 million to the Moslem Supreme Council run in fact by the former Grand Mufti. The decisive factor remained the spirit of the Palestinian Jewish community and particularly of its young people, determined to fight and needing weapons. Only a token UN international force was desired, she declared, since the yishuv wished no one else to do their fighting for them. The distinction between maintenance of peace in that war-torn country and enforcement of partition, raised by the United States at the Security Council, Myerson termed “a legal quibble.” She would now fly home.³⁷

Myerson’s mission had achieved a resounding success, indeed nothing short of incredible. On March 29, two days after forty-six members of the Hagana were killed in a convoy to kibbutz Yehiam, and ten days after US delegate Warren Austin shocked the Security Council when announcing that a temporary trusteeship should be established for Palestine, Montor could report to the JDC staff in New York that $43 million had arrived in cash, with outstanding pledges of about $7.5 million—the $50 million goal actually to be oversubscribed. The availability of these dollars was “providential” for the yishuv’s situation, he and Coons told the UJA executive committee, the American Jewish community’s “genuine spirit of consecration” evident in its response to this “unique and historical call for statesmanlike action to meet a crucial situation.” With funds shifted by Hammer via a credit account with Manufacturers Trust Bank to the Anglo-Palestine Bank in Jerusalem (later Bank Leumi) and to Geneva, where the Jewish Agency’s Chaim Posner (later Pazner) transferred them at higher black market rates to Ueberall in Prague, vital Czechoslovak armaments reached the beleaguered Hagana just in time to launch its first battle offensive on April 1. Safer convoys from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem, as well as the capture of Tiberias and Haifa, sparking the flight of thousands of Arabs in those areas, soon followed. Fierce assaults against kibbutzim Mishmar HaEmek and Ramat Yohanan failed, the surrounding Arab villages razed. A general collapse of Arab morale in Palestine, especially after the death of Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini at the key al-Qastal village dominating the western entrance to Jerusalem and the Irgun’s killing of close to 110 Deir Yassin villagers, ensued.38

Ben-Gurion, having secured a 6 to 4 vote on May 12 of the Minhelet HaAm (People’s Administrative Council) to reject an American truce proposal and Marshall’s admonition to Shertok not to declare statehood at this time, moved ahead with a proclamation of independence. Two days earlier, Myerson had sharply rejected Abdullah’s appeal during their second secret meeting that the Jews delay for one year announcing sovereignty, after which the country would be united with Jordan in a “Judeo-Arab” kingdom where Jewish membership in the Parliament and Cabinet could reach fifty percent. On May 14, 1948, upon declaring in Tel-Aviv’s Museum of Art on 16 Rothschild Boulevard that Medinat Yisrael would stand for “the principles of liberty, justice and peace as conceived by the Prophets of Israel,” be open to “the ingathering of exiles,” give full citizenship to the Arab people of Israel, and extend the hand of peace to all the neighboring states, Ben-Gurion, the fifty-two year old resolute leader, became the first to sign a typed document marking the end of 1,888 years of exile from Jewry’s birthplace. Of the thirty-six who followed in Hebrew alphabetical order, two were women: WIZO pioneer Rachel (Kagan) Cohen, head of the Va’ad HaLeumi’s Social Welfare Department, and the individual whom Ben-Gurion had persuaded his Mapai colleagues to include in the Provisional Government “as an historic act,” “G. Myerson.” Sitting in her best black dress, with Shertok holding the document, she could not stop crying when thinking of all those who should have been present but were not. News had also just been received that the Etzion bloc had fallen with heavy losses. A few minutes after midnight, Myerson was filled with “joy and relief” upon hearing that Truman had quickly recognized the State of Israel, she thinking it “like a miracle coming at the time of our greatest vulnerability, on the eve of the Arab invasion.39

Morgenthau acknowledged this revolutionary moment in Jewish history after Warburg had objected to a press release by issuing a statement to American Jews as UJA General Chairman that appealed for their financial support, hailing this “source of great spiritual excitement,” knowing that “a new chapter in world Jewish history has been opened,” and “convinced that this new state will add stature to Jews everywhere.” Earlier that spring, he had played a decisive role as well in the Jewish Agency’s obtaining a special loan of $10 million from Manufacturers Trust. With Montor in tow, he had accompanied Hammer to see the chairman of the board, Harvey Gibson, at the bank’s headquarters in New York City. Although Gibson did not have cordial relations with Morgenthau during World War II when serving as president of the American Red Cross, the former US Secretary of the Treasury bluntly took over the meeting, candidly declaring that the funds might well be used for military purposes and pressing for the loan. His forthright manner overcame Gibson’s initial insistence that the bank did not finance wars, and the board chairman’s coolness gave way to declaring that an exception would be made in this instance. In subsequent years, Hammer reminisced, the Agency’s relationship with Manufacturers Hanover, the bank’s successor, proved to be “smooth and fully responsive to our requests.” For his “outstanding leadership’ in the UJA program, Morgenthau now received the 1948 award for “distinguished service to Jewry” from the National Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs.⁴⁰

Two days after the historic proclamation in Tel-Aviv, Montor cabled Myerson urging that she return quickly to the United States even for a short tour, convinced that her presence might well sway American Jewry to give another $50 million to the new State of Israel. After consulting with Ben-Gurion, who insisted that she, like other State officials, Hebraize her name, Golda Meir took the next plane available for LaGuardia Field. In city after city, at UJA lunches, dinners and teas, and at parlor meetings, she repeated one theme: “We cannot go on without your help.” Meir’s audiences, she reminisced, answered with “unprecedented generosity and speed.” Most commitments were made by private figures, but Jack Benny (born Benjamin Kubelsky) sent a check to fellow radio star Eddie Cantor (Edward Israel Itzkowitz), then hosting Meir’s appearance at his home, with the note “Eddie, fill in this check for whatever you need.” Cantor filled in the check for $25,000, which he knew was the minimum that Benny, whose popular program made stinginess the most famous part of his persona, would have given.41

The fifty percent gained now for Israel in the UJA drive for 1948 (the other fifty percent going to the JDC) enabled the well-armed Israeli Defense Forces (Tzahal) to eventually turn the tide against the five invading Arab armies. Upon hearing in January about her “fairly grim picture of immediate needs,” Jewish Agency executive secretary in New York Arthur Lourie had written an associate in Jerusalem that “it is too early to say whether her mission here will be successful, but she has determination and courage and if anyone can do the job I think it will be she.” Meir’s initial triumph, augmented by the second trip to the States, gave BenGurion good reason to tell this to the yishuv’s emissary upon her return: “Someday when history will be written, it will be said that there was a Jewish woman who got the money which made the state possible.”⁴²

On July 1, upon receiving an urgent request from the Provisional Government of Israel to reach Truman, Morgenthau wrote to the President asking that he take every available step to rush relief supplies to Jerusalem, the embattled city cut off from normal communications. At least a hundred tons of milk power and fifty tons of eggs were needed within a week’s time, children particularly suffering because of the blockade. Israel was prepared to pay for these essential supplies with its own funds for goods available from the US government stocks in Europe. While receiving no reply, he wrote one week later to Kaplan and Ben-Gurion advising that a US committee be formed without delay to coordinate all funds raised for Israel. To be known as the American Friends of the State of Israel, it would have a quasi-official recognition from the Israeli authorities as the “sole clearing house” for all collections of funds in America, the monies transmitted to the treasury of the new government. During the balance of 1948, he continued, the UJA should be authorized to deposit funds that normally would go to the UPA to the new state’s fiscal agent directly. He was transmitting this confidential suggestion through the good offices of Montor, the message ended, who would bring the plan to them and explain it in greater detail.⁴³

Morgenthau strongly endorsed Montor’s charge that the current American Zionist leadership sought to use funds raised in the United States as a lever with which to change or dominate Israel’s social structure, which led Montor to resign that September as UPA executive vice-president after many years of service and sparked his effort to create a new organization to raise funds for direct transmission to the Jewish state. With UPA chairman Abba Hillel Silver pressuring the Jewish Agency executive in Jerusalem by control of the flow of these funds, Hammer sought to eliminate the role of the UPA as the organization that transmitted funds from the UJA to the Jewish Agency, and found an ally in Rose Halprin of the Hadassah Women’s Zionist Organization presidium. Quietly, she conferred with Morgenthau, then attending a UJA conference in New Orleans. He and Montor, resenting Silver’s “overbearing manner” and his determination to “to control every situation,” agreed with legal counsel Maurice Boukstein’s idea to incorporate the Agency’s New York office as an entirely new organization, to be called The Jewish Agency, Inc. Montor prevailed upon his volunteer leadership to recognize this entity as the recipient of funds intended to be used in Israel. Silver resigned and the crisis came to a swift close. The UPA, soon to be renamed the United Israel Appeal and drawing more easily through the local welfare funds, shifted the burden of fund raising to the non-Zionist communal leaders and thereby reduced the ZOA’s conservative influence, this to the understandable satisfaction of Ben-Gurion and others of the Labor Party which led the Israeli government.44

Taking his first trip to Israel that October, focusing on how UJA funds could aid in meeting the state’s future needs, Morgenthau pressed this cause with Ben-Gurion and Kaplan. Upon landing, he declared that “Israel’s struggle for independence has greatly increased the dignity and stature of Jew everywhere,” and that Israel’s struggle concerned “all freedom-loving peoples” and was “a test of the United Nations.” He hoped that the US government would play the fullest role in the prompt establishment of peace in Israel on the basis of justice, and asserted that American Jews were determined to give every support for the Jews now in Israel and also for the hundreds of thousands in Europe whose future depended on the new commonwealth. He happily introduced as his traveling companion young Curtis Roosevelt Boettiger, the late President’s grandson, who had come as the special representative of Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, “who is keenly interested in the successful establishment of the Jewish state as a stronghold of democracy in the Middle East.”45

The ten-day visit, including a brief tour of the battlefront lines, deeply impressed Morgenthau. He marveled at how the “Burma Road” was carved out of the rock of the Judean hills: “It could not have been made possible if the young men and women who built it were not motivated by an unquenchable search for freedom and peace.” He noted the care that Israeli soldiers took protecting Arab mosques and shrines in Ramleh. “The state of Israel without Jerusalem would be like the Jewish people without its history,” he asserted after a surprise visit to that city. On the first celebration in the new state of Simchat Torah, Morgenthau joined Ben-Gurion in dancing with a Torah scroll to the cheers of spectators. Distanced from religious practice since youth, he then wiped tears from his eyes. Just before Morgenthau’s departure, the new government expressed its gratitude to the UJA General Chairman by conferring its highest honor—naming the former Palestinian Arab village Khirbat Bayt between Gedera and Latrun, a moshav populated by Jewish immigrants from Greece, Poland, and Turkey, Tal Shachar (“Morning Dew,” taken from the German word Morgenthau). Calling this occasion “one of the greatest moments of my life,” he told the crowd that by showing the Israeli Jew to be “a fighting man,” “you have raised the standard of the Jew in the Christian world.” “You will have to depend on your own strong right arm,” he cautioned, because the young republic had “very few friends in the outside world.” This was the kind of “exultant militancy,” future UJA board chairman Herbert Friedman remembered, which inspired both the American and the Israeli Jewish communities.⁴⁶

From then onward, Morgenthau became an unabashed champion of the State of Israel. Immediately upon returning home, he proclaimed that the US government “should have a policy of its own towards Israel and not follow the British Foreign Office.” “The State of Israel is stronger than ever. They are going to win,” he confidently added when disclosing that the Israeli Navy had intercepted one vessel carrying a great shipment of weapons to Syria. One month later, he appealed to British Prime Minister Clement Attlee and predecessor Winston Churchill to press for the release of 11,000 Jews interned by British authorities on the island of Cyprus. Declaring that “their only crime is that they are Jews who escaped death at the hands of Hitler and sought to find life among their own people in Israel,” Morgenthau charged that “these men, women and some 600 babies have been subjected to the most inhuman forms of degradation.” He added that “if the British people could see the intolerable conditions under which the Cyprus refugees live, they would demand that the refugees be freed to leave for Israel at once.” The people and government of Israel were eager and anxious to receive the Cyprus “prisoners,” and give them an opportunity to build new lives. Of the 11,000 Jews held in prison camps on Cyprus, at least fifty percent have been there for two years, another twenty-five percent for more than eighteen months and the remainder for at least six months, he stated.47

Morgenthau played a decisive role as well in preserving the UJA’s income tax exemption status when the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism filed an affidavit and brought a suit declaring that the UJA was in effect an agent of a foreign government. Characteristically, Morgenthau took charge, and called in Randolph E. Paul, a former member of his staff who became a part-time Special Assistant to Truman for tax policy and later the President’s envoy to the negotiations between Switzerland and the Allied Powers on Nazi assets in that country. Hammer and Agency legal counsel Boukstein, as well as Morgenthau and Montor, worked over the next few months with Paul in meeting the charges. These were successfully refuted to the satisfaction of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) with one provision: the Jewish Agency must indicate that any funds transmitted and received in Israel from the UJA would not be sent directly and be used solely for humanitarian (not military) purposes. Ben-Gurion then signed a resolution adopted by the Agency executive that it would never violate IRS regulations. Few ever knew of Morgenthau’s intervention.⁴⁸

The UJA leadership’s involvement in Truman’s upset victory over New York State’s Governor Thomas E. Dewey in the 1948 presidential election also remained a secret for many years. Determined to overcome a deficit in the polls, the American Chief Executive traveled more than 30,000 miles by rail to bring his message to the people in large cities and eke out a victory. During this “whistle-stop tour,” begun in September aboard a seventeen-car train called “The Magellan,” Truman spoke at 352 places aided by talking points that seven young men, one of whom having escaped Nazi Germany just in time, sent him by air courier to a runner from the train. This localized, popular approach had to be paid for. Abraham (Abe) Feinberg, former president of Americans for Hagana, resolved to raise the necessary funds in gratitude for Truman’s support for Israel and the President’s promise on May 27 to Weizmann, then accompanied to the White House by Feinberg, of a large loan to the new state. Montor asked Friedman to work towns along the train route, raise cash, and bring it to the train each day. A carefully selected list of people connected to the UJA campaign was drawn up for each location on the schedule, and the money collected once Friedman made his appeal placed in a brown paper bag. With this as the only serious fund raising taking place on his behalf, Truman was not embarrassed to tell Friedman how much he appreciate the effort. “The Magellan” thus kept to schedule, returning to Washington just before election day.49

Montor was also instrumental in the creation of a new financial instrument to aid Israel in the spring of 1950. A major problem had arisen from the confluence of several events: the massive immigration of almost 1,000 Jewish refugees which reached the state’s shores each day, doubling the pre-war population to 1.2 million; a precipitous drop in UJA funding owing to American Jewry’s apparent inability to grasp that the Israeli government would continue its mission of kibbutz galuyot (“the ingathering of exiles”); and a shortage of food that led to rationing. Ben-Gurion and Kaplan convened a Jerusalem conference that September to determine a strategy for meeting this crisis at which Sharett, Meir, and Jewish Agency chairman Berl Locker sat down with the American delegation: Montor, Rothberg, Myers, Halprin, Nathan, Friedman, Feinberg, US businessman Joseph Meyerhoff, and WZO president Nahum Goldmann. “Fiercely intense and persistent,” Montor opened by declaring that the UJA was doomed, and he proposed in its stead that the State of Israel issue bonds to finance its operations. Usually “ice-cold and tightly reined in,” Montor railed at those who feared a bond drive, who he claimed were hiding their fear behind a pious concern for the health of the UJA. The more moderate Friedman advocated trying both the bond approach and strengthening the UJA under the new chairmanship of Joseph J. Schwartz, former JDC director in wartime Europe, in order to reach a goal of $1.5 billion for the next three years. The conference adopted this position, assigning $1 billion to come from the United States.⁵⁰

Montor left the UJA to organize the new campaign for the American Financial and Development Corporation for Israel, soon to be called Israel Bonds, Ben-Gurion tapping Meir to present this to a national conference in Washington, DC that October. She offered skeptical listeners the “gilt-edged security” of the people of Israel and their children, who were growing up “proud, safe, self-respecting Jews,” the debt to be paid back with interest. The ZOA pledged on that occasion to purchase $100 million of the bonds. When Morgenthau received Truman’s blessing for the new venture, the President understanding the need for long-term financing for economic growth, the assembly voted to proceed. The chances of success improved greatly when Morgenthau agreed to leave the UJA and serve as chairman of the Board of Governors. In May 1951 Ben-Gurion kicked off the first campaign in Chicago, with a rally of 100,000 at Soldier’s Field and a ticker-tape parade down State Street. The first year brought in $52.5 million. When launching the drive in January 1953, Ehud Avriel, now Director General of Israel’s finance ministry, declared that the proceeds of the Israel Bond issue had made it possible for the State of Israel to embark on “many vital projects linked to its primary objective of achieving economic independence within the shortest possible time.” The next month, the Soviet government newspaper Izvestiia charged that Morgenthau, along with fellow Jews US Congressmen from New York Emanuel Celler and Jacob Javits, had worked out plans to make Israel the major anti-Communist stronghold of the United States in the Middle East. He stayed on as board chairman until the end of that year, deciding to bow out because he objected to Israel’s financial policies. Morgenthau chose to do so gracefully, as he jotted down the very last entry in his Presidential Diaries, “and not look for anything or expect anything further from the Government of Israel.”51

The man whom Meir later considered “far more influential than Ben-Gurion, Kaplan, Montor and myself put together” in championing Israel Bonds after leading the UJA’s postwar success, who never received any compensation “whatsoever” from either organization, now faded from the spotlight. A brief feature story carried by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in early 1958 quoted Morgenthau’s statement that Israel’s victories by “a handful of soldiers” in the 1948 war, followed by its lightening success in the Sinai Campaign at the end of October 1956, enhanced the prestige of the Jewish commonwealth and of Jews throughout the world. He refused to comment when asked whether he thought the United States would come to Israel’s aid if that state were attacked, but asserted that he had no fears for Israel’s future. He expected to visit Israel the following March, a plan that would not came to fruition.52

On the night of February 7, 1967, after suffering a heart condition and a long illness, the seventy-five-year-old Henry Morgenthau, Jr. died at the Vassar Brothers Hospital overlooking the Hudson River in Poughkeepsie, New York. Funeral services were held two days later at Reform flagship congregation Temple Emanu-El on Sixty-Fifth St. and Fifth Ave. in New York City, the survivors his widow, the former Marcelle Puthon Hirsch, and three children from a first marriage to Elinor née Fatman, a close friend to Eleanor Roosevelt. Only three hundred people came that morning to pay their last respects. The eulogies by Senior Rabbi Julius Mark and John M. Blum, the Yale University historian and a fellow Jew who had edited Morgenthau’s diaries, did not say a word about his activities on behalf of Jews or of Israel, although he had openly asserted two months after the state’s establishment that “the most important Jewish issue before the Jews of America is the success of the State of Israel,” and that “any element which would retard or defeat that success must have our unyielding opposition.” Montor, seated next to Klotz, served as an honorary pallbearer, as did Rosenwald, Sonneborn, Friedman, and Schwartz. That evening, writing as Morgenthau’s “right hand” during their joint efforts at the UJA and Israel Bonds, Montor noted to US District Attorney Robert Morgenthau what his late father’s dedication and enormous prestige had done in creating “unity and harmony” in American Jewry, as well as in helping to establish the atmosphere within which huge sums were raised on behalf of the Palestinian Jewish community and then the State of Israel. He “encouraged the timid, converted the indifferent, and gave new vigor to the old stalwarts,” Montor concluded, “a great American but also a great Jew. Few have equaled his commitment to both causes.”⁵³

Montor paid additional tributes to “the old man” in public and in private. In the Israeli daily Ma’ariv, “Henry on Henry” thought it conceivable that Morgenthau’s German-Jewish origin explained why something in his personality did not generate friendship. Yet beneath the cold exterior, there was a feeling of warmth, and without him it was doubtful that Israel would have been able to raise such large sums of money for the state’s urgent needs. A few months later, writing to his UJA assistant, Montor described “a naïve, uninformed man” but one “dedicated to the tasks at hand.” These included “frenetic efforts” to save Jews during the Holocaust, and having “an uncanny skill” when Secretary of the Treasury in surrounding himself with superb civil servants who were “able and incorruptible.” In a more candid, long missive three weeks later, Montor recalled Morgenthau’s attractive smile, the curious maneuvering with his hands, his quick rise to anger, and his equal return to serenity. He had an intuition and a sensibility that were “truly remarkable.” Like political Zionism’s founder Theodor Herzl, Morgenthau came of a totally un-Jewish background but was “moved by particular events to become a Jew.” When he did, Montor added, “he was neurotic, indefatigable, unashamed in trying to save Jews.” Under the pressure, encouragement, and emotion of Klotz, who goes completely unmentioned in Blum’s three volumes of the Morgenthau diaries, he went “racing after any hope” that could be found to save those who were “suffering solely because they were Jews.” Montor did not add Morgenthau’s deep suspicion, confided to a few, that Truman had rejected his presence at the Potsdam Conference because he was a Jew and could succeed to the presidency, although there is no indication of this in anything Truman said or wrote.54

Montor’s passion and fierce will strongly influenced many, notably Rothberg, who became chief officer of Israel Bonds, but his dictatorial style and “self-confidence to a fault” increasingly created friction with UJA even after he retired as chief executive officer of Israel Bonds in May 1955. Reports of frequent conflicts with local Jewish community leaders and particularly UJA chairman Schwartz, the two men quarreling over the timing of the two campaigns and competing for volunteer manpower, reached Levi Eshkol. Israel’s third Prime Minister unsuccessfully sought to resolve the situation by calling a meeting in Jerusalem. Frustrated at the dashing of his hope that he had settled the problem, he cabled Montor, then in Rome on his way back to the States, to return for further discussions. When Montor refused, a sign of what Friedman subsequently dubbed his “mercurial volatility,” Eshkol fired him without further ado.⁵⁵

From then on, Montor took up residence in Rome and Jerusalem. In the Eternal City, so called because ancient Romans believed that no matter what happened to the world or how many empires came and collapsed, Rome would go on forever, he established a consumer finance company. His Finanza Popolare also developed branches in Milan and Turin. Contacts with the Zionist establishment dwindled, although Weizmann had cabled him immediately upon Montor’s break with the UPA in October 1948 with this message: “Regret hearing your resignation. Feel confident Israel will continue to have benefit of your loyal, devoted, brilliant service. Warm regards.” Looking back at those years, Meir judged Montor’s share to be “critical” in the UJA’s achievements, his ability to work “limitless,” and his knowledge of what every Jew had, what his problems were, and how much he should give nothing short of “incredible.” And in 1960, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary celebration of Israel Bonds, Ben-Gurion, the man who willed a state, declared that Henry Montor’s name was high among “a list of ten individuals most responsible for the creation of the State of Israel.”56

Montor died of leukemia on April 16, 1982, in Jerusalem’s Hadassah hospital, a son and a daughter his immediate survivors. The “dynamic and sometimes controversial figure on the American Jewish scene,” read the obituary notice by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “was widely respected for his vision and innovative methods.” He was “at times considered a thorn in the side of the Jewish establishment because of the zeal with which he sought increased funds for Israel. His effectiveness as an advocate of the primacy of Israel as a new home for the survivors of the Holocaust often placed him in the role of a leading spokesman for Israel as it stood on the threshold of independence.” Thanks in great measure to his aggressive and novel, creative style, the UJA and Israel Bonds had raised more than $14 billion for Israel’s social, welfare and economic development programs. Now, without fanfare, burial took place on the Mount of Olives just east of Jerusalem.⁵⁷

To American Jews, Myerson/Meir embodied the collective will of the embattled yishuv, prepared to defend its home to the very end against an Arab world committed to its destruction. Morgenthau, breaking with his staunchly anti-Zionist father’s final piece of advice that he not have anything to do with Jews, brought his great prestige and sincerity to win over various influential circles, his personality giving “substance and power” to the campaigns. He surely merited the B’nai Brith gold medallion, which read “Lover of Israel,” for his outstanding contributions to the World War II effort and refugee relief. ⁵⁸ Montor provided important contacts, publicity skills, and zealous drive, his unrelenting pursuit of the revival of Holocaust survivors and of Israel’s rebirth vital to eventual triumph. Meir would go on to become the first ambassador of the State of Israel to the Soviet Union, Knesset member, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mapai secretary general, and Prime Minister before her death on December 8, 1978. Most fittingly, her final resting place would be on Jerusalem’s Mt. Herzl alongside other leaders of Medinat Yisra’el. Morgenthau’s contribution would be acknowledged in Tal Shahar and on a street sign in Jerusalem. Montor’s gravestone, simply giving in Hebrew his places and dates of birth and death, is his only memorial in Israel. The Mt. of Olives registry lists that one plot as muznah (neglected).

Meir’s legacy is deservedly enshrined in Israel’s memory, while that of Morgenthau is dimly remembered and that of Montor forgotten. In their crusade to save a Jewish state during the short interval as the clock inexorably neared May 14, 1948, the three had confronted considerable odds to success. Yet, working assiduously in concert and with some dedicated JDC-UJA executives, they touched the hearts of American Jews who “gave as Jews,” such as the thousands at a rally in New York City’s garment district who heard her offer them a choice between meeting in Madison Square Garden to rejoice in the establishment of a Jewish state or to meet there at another memorial meeting for the Jews in Palestine “who are gone.”59 The Jews of America were eager to take part in the tectonic shift which ultimately brought their people back onto the world’s center stage with sovereignty in Israel after two millennia. During the Montor/Morgenthau era, the center of philanthropy moved from Europe to Israel, bringing non-Zionists as well to assume the significant role of active partners in the drama.

Nothing was certain at that point in time. Many years later, Gideon Rafael recalled that when he, Sharett, and a secretary, then comprising Israel’s entire foreign office, tried at 2 a.m. on May 15, 1948, to send out telegrams announcing the creation of the new state, only after the approval of the expense by the man appointed by the British to handle the transition was Israel’s independence pronounced to the world.⁶⁰ A new journey in the odyssey of Jewish history had begun.

Endnotes

1.Kaplan to Jewish Agency New York for Montor, January 20, 1948, S25/1701, Central Zionist Archives (hereafter CZA), Jerusalem; Henry Montor, “Hashpa’ato Al Yahadut America,” in Eliezer Kaplan, Chazon U’Ma’as, ed. Y. Shapira (Tel-Aviv, 1973), 137–141. Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” an unprecedented orgy of destruction and terror, methodically targeted Jewish shops, synagogues, orphanages, and dwellings; led to the death of almost 100 Jews and hundreds wounded; the deportation of more than 30,000 Jews to concentration camps (where several hundred would die in the following weeks); and soon a Central Office for Jewish Emigration headed by SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann for all Jews to fall under the Third Reich’s control. See Monty Noam Penkower, The Swastika’s Darkening Shadow: Voices before the Holocaust (New York, 2013), 83–85, 213–220.

2.Henry Montor interview with the author, June 8, 1977; Barbara KirshenblattGimblett, “Performing the State: The Jewish Palestine Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, 1939/40,” in The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times, ed. B. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and J. Karp (Philadelphia, 2008), 98–115. The Hagana, first formed in 1920 against Palestinian Arab attacks, served under the aegis of the Jewish Agency as the paramilitary defense arm of the yishuv.

3.Montor interview, May 5, 1977; Sam Rothberg interview, May 4, 1976; both in UJA Archives, New York City; Gottlieb Hammer, Good Faith and Credit (New York, 1985), 213–214.

4.Monty Noam Penkower, The Jews Were Expendable: Free World Diplomacy and the Holocaust (Urbana, 1984), chap. 5; idem, “The Earl Harrison Report: Its Genesis and Its Significance,” American Jewish Archives 68:1 (2016): 1–75; Montor interview with the author, June 15, 1977.

5.Montor to Meltzer, February 15, 1967, A371/34; Montor to Kaplan, December 5, 1946, S63/333; both in CZA.

6.Montor interview with the author, June 8, 1977; Marc Lee Raphael, A History of the United Jewish Appeal (Brown University, 1982), 30; Herbert A. Friedman, Roots of the Future (Jerusalem, 1999), 226, 337, and chap. 16; Jewish Telegraphic Agency (hereafter JTA), February 8, 1967.

7.April 30, 1947, and May 1, 1947, vol. 8, Presidential Diaries, Henry Morgenthau, Jr. MSS., Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York; Monty Noam Penkower, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, 1945–1948, vol. 2, Into the International Arena, 1947–1948 (New York, 2019), 405–409. One month later, he telephoned Truman asking that the Chief Executive intercede against the British cabinet’s decision to send the 4,554 Holocaust survivors aboard the Exodus 1947, who had sought entry into Palestine in the face of restrictive British immigration law, back to their original exit port from France. Morgenthau’s private intervention raised the President’s ire; the State Department soon declared that it could not intervene because His Majesty’s Government carried “full responsibility” for maintaining peace and order in Palestine. Ibid., 446–447.

8.Montor interview with the author, June 8, 1977; JTA, March 26, 1946; Montor interview, May 5, 1977, UJA Archives.

9.Coons-Montor to Myerson, January 22, 1948, S25/1558, CZA.

10.Penkower, Palestine to Israel, vol. 2, 546, 552; Kaplan to Ben-Gurion, December 5, 1947; Ben-Gurion to Kaplan, December 8, 1947; both in S25/1700, CZA.

11.Myerson-Cunningham interview, December 17, 1947, S25/22; Myerson to Shertok, December 16, 1947, S25/1700; both in CZA; Foreign Relations of the United States, 1947, vol. 5 (Washington, DC, 1971), 1090–1096; BenGurion to Kaplan, December 14, 1947, S25/1700; Myerson-Gurney interview, December 29, 1947, S25/7725; both in CZA; David Ben-Gurion, Yoman Milchama, Milchemet Ha’Atsmaut, 1948–1949, vol. 1, ed. G. Rivlin and E. Oren (Tel-Aviv, 1984), 88. For the US arms embargo, see Amitsur Ilan, The Origin of the Arab-Israeli Arms Race (London, 1996).

12.Ben-Gurion, Yoman Milchama, 92–96.

13.Ibid., 100, 107–108, 121, 122; Penkower, Palestine to Israel, vol. 2, 547, 551 554.

14.Ben-Gurion, Yoman Milchama, 135–143; Myerson to Shertok, January 13, 1948, S25/1701, CZA; Golda Meir, My Life (New York, 1975), 211–212.

15.Penkower, Palestine to Israel, vol. 2, 555–556, 565. In August 1949, kibbutz Netiv HaLamed Heh (Path of the Thirty-Five) was founded by former Palmach members of the Hagana at a key point along the route which the convoy had traversed that fateful night. A few months later, the decomposed bodies, twelve identified by Rav Aryeh Levin by means of a rarely performed biblical lottery attributed to the Vilna Gaon, were brought in November to the Mt. Herzl cemetery in Jerusalem and buried in a separate section.

16.Meir interview, June 8, 1975, with Hodes, Nardi, and Kaufman, in Living UJA History: Irving Bernstein, An Oral History Anthology (Jerusalem, 1995); MeirBethell interview, May 24, 1977, P-1784, Israel State Archives, Jerusalem; Ben-Gurion, Yoman Milchama, 168.

17.Living Jewish History, 6–7, Montor-Kaufman interview, April 15, 1976, UJA Archives. In a field staff memorandum more than a year earlier, Lurie had stressed that the Council’s “greatest strength” was its “non-political and non-partisan” character, that it expressed “no preference on controversial and ideological issues.” Memo, November 7, 1946, Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds Archives, New York City.

18.Montor to Steinglas, March 12, 1969, A371/549, CZA; Memorandum, January 24–26, 1948, Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds Archives, New York City.

19.Myerson address, January 25, 1948, MRD-1, 37/2, UJA Archives. A briefer version was published twenty-five years later in Marie Syrkin, ed., A Land of Our Own: An Oral Autobiography by Golda Meir (New York, 1973), 73–79.

20.Francine Klagsburn, Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel (New York, 2017), 305; Montor-Kaufman interview, April 15, 1976, UJA Archives.

21.Minutes, January 26, 1948, Z6/50; Myerson statement, January 26, 1948, Z5/411; both in CZA; Beeley note, January 27, 1948, Foreign Office records 371/68533, Public Record Office, Kew, England.

22.Montor interview, May 5, 1977, UJA Archives; Montor to Meltzer, March 12, 1969, A371/34, CZA.

23.Baerwald memo, January 21, 1948, Paul Baerwald MSS., Herbert Lehman MSS., Columbia University, New York City; Leavitt report, Administration Committee, January 27, 1948, JDC Archives, New York City.

24.Montor interview with the author, June 8, 1977; Montor to Steinglas, March 12, 1969, A371/549, CZA; Leavitt to Montor, February 2, 1948; JDC Staff Meeting, February 2, 1948; both in JDC Archives; Myerson to Ben-Gurion, February 2, 1948, S25/1702, CZA.

25.Executive meeting, February 4, 1948, MRD-1, 33/1, UJA Archives; BaerwaldGoldwasser letter, February 6, 1948, Lehman MSS.; Penkower, Palestine to Israel, vol. 2, 566–567. Montor had secured from the JDC the joint goal for the 1948 UJA drive of $250 million (of which less than $150 million would be raised), with the UPA getting forty-five percent of the first $50 million, fifty-five percent of the next $75 million, and at least seventy-five percent of the remainder. Raphael, A History of the United Jewish Appeal, 33.

26.JDC Staff Meeting New York, February 9, 1948, JDC Archives.

27.Lehman to Stern, January 21, 1948, Herbert Lehman MSS., Columbia University, New York City; UJA executive, January 4, 1948, MRD-1, 33/1, UJA Archives; February 11, 1948, vol. 8, Presidential Diaries, Morgenthau MSS.; Morgenthau letter, February 18, 1948, MRD-1, 34/1, UJA Archives.

28.JTA, January 19, 1948.

29.Meir interview, June 1975, UJA Archives.

30.Raphael, A History of the United Jewish Appeal, 34–35; JTA, February 10, 1948.

31.JTA, February 24, 1948.

32.Hammer to Kaplan, February 14, 1948, S25/1558, CZA; Meir-Hodess interview, June 1975, UJA Archives.

33.Ruffer to Sharef, February 10, 1948, 93.03/64/18, Israel State Archives; Security Committee, February 10, 1948, S25/9346; Myerson to Ben-Gurion, February 10, 1948, S25/1702; both in CZA; Ben-Gurion to Myerson, February 10, 1948, Yoman Milchama, 232n.

34.Penkower, Palestine to Israel, vol. 2, 576–578.

35.Executive meeting, February 23, 1948, Council archives; Penkower, Palestine to Israel, vol. 2, 582–585, 591.

36.Ibid., 601; JTA, March 7, 1948.

37.JTA, March 11, 1948.

38.Staff meeting, March 29, 1948, JDC Archives; Montor-Coons report, March 26, 1948, Council archives; Gottlieb Hammer interview with the author, December 6, 1977; Chaim Pazner interview with the author, June 20, 1979; Penkower, Palestine to Israel, vol. 2, 617, 644–646, 649. Hammer would continue to send Posner requested funds until the State of Israel’s independence. See Z5/3491, CZA.

39.Penkower, Palestine to Israel, vol. 2, 670–672, 678; Ben-Gurion, Yoman Milchama, 281–282; Meir, My Life, 216–230. Myerson had already, after returning from the United States, urged her Mapai colleagues on March 20 to declare statehood, even if a provisional government. Akhshav O Le’Olam Lo, ed. M. Avizohar and A. Bareli (Beit Berl, 1989), 357–358.

40.Montor to Steinglas, September 2, 1967, A371/547; UJA Bulletin, May 16, 1948, A371/356; both in CZA; Hammer, Good Faith and Credit, 89–90; JTA, May 30, 1948.

41.Meir, My Life, 214, 223–225; Lawrence J. Epstein, The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America (New York, 2001), 63–64.

42.Lourie to Kohn, January 27, 1948, S4/565, CZA; Meir, My Life, 214. For the totals raised by the yishuv towards its War of Independence, of which Meir’s UJA campaign, bringing in $129 million—with a little over $40 million spent for defense or fifty-five percent of the financing of foreign purchases, see Yitzhak Greenberg, “Financing the War of Independence,” Studies in Zionism 9:1 (1988): 63–80; Haim Barkai, “HaAlut HaReialit Shel Milchemet HaAtsma’ut 1948–1949,” in Milchemet Ha’Atsmaut, Diyun M’Hudash, ed. A. Kadish (Tel Aviv, 2004), vol. 2, 759–791; Moshe Naor, “From Voluntary Funds to National Loans, The Financing of Israel’s 1948 War Effort,” Israel Studies 11 (2006): 62–82. Also see Doron Almog, HaRekhesh B’Artsot HaBrit 1945–1949 (Tel Aviv, 1987); Doron Rozen, B’Ikhvot HaOtsar HaAmerika’i: Pe’ilut HaHaganah B’Artsot HaBrit 1945– 1949 (Tel Aviv, 2008).

43.Morgenthau to Truman, July 1, 1948; Morgenthau to Kaplan and to BenGurion, July 8, 1948; both in Presidential Diaries, Morgenthau MSS.

44.JTA, October 15, 1948; Hammer, Good Faith and Credit, 130–132; Urofsky, We Are One!, American Jewry and Israel (New York, 1978), 279–286.

45.JTA, October 21, 22, 25, and 26, 1948; November 3 and 11, 1948; Ben-Gurion, Yoman Milchama, 757, 769, 771–772, 780.

46.JTA, October 25 and 26, 1948; Friedman, Roots of the Future, 338. The “Burma Road” was a makeshift bypass road between Kibbutz Hulda and Jerusalem to counter the Arab attacks on the Tel-Aviv road to Jerusalem, built under the supervision of visiting US General “Mickey” Marcus during the 1948 Arab siege of Jerusalem.

47.JTA, November 2, 1948; December 21, 1948.

48.Montor to Kaplan, May 6, 1948, Z5/3115, CZA; Montor interview, May 5, 1977, UJA Archives; Hammer, Good Faith and Credit, 95–96.

49.Philip White, Whistle Stop: How 31,000 Miles of Train Travel, 352 Speeches, and a Little Midwest Gumption Saved the Presidency of Harry Truman (New York, 2014); Friedman, Roots for the Future, 145–146; I. L. Kenen, “Abraham Feinberg,” February 16, 1973, courtesy of I. L. Kenen (in the author’s possession).

50.Friedman, Roots of the Future, chap. 20.

51.Meir, My Life, 269–270; Melvin I. Urofsky, We Are One!, 201–203; Friedman, Roots of the Future, 170; JTA, January 19 and 30, 1953; JTA, February 25, 1953; Decrmber 9, 1953, vol. 8, Presidential Diaries, Morgenthau MSS. While the Israel Bonds Organization sold a total of $19 billion by 1998, the UJA, contrary to Montor’s attack as to its uselessness, raised about $700 million in its annual campaign that same year.

52.Meir, My Life, 270; Montor to Steinglas, January 14, 1969, A371/548, CZA; JTA, January 16, 1958.

53.JTA, February 8, 1967; Morgenthau statement, July 4, 1948, MRD-1, 4/3, UJA Archives; Montor to Steinglas, February 11, 1967; Montor to R. Morgenthau, February 9, 1967; both in A371/547, CZA. A plain memorial stone in Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Hawthorne, Westchester County, marking the graves and Morgenthau and his first wife, just gives the respective years of birth and death.

54.Ma’ariv, February 24, 1967; Montor to Steinglas, December 25, 1967, A371/547; Montor to Steinglas, January 13, 1968, A371/548; both in CZA; Penkower, “The Earl Harrison Report,” 62. At the time, without Truman having named a Vice-President, and before a constitutional amendment altering the order of succession, the Secretary of the Treasury would succeed if Truman and Secretary of State James Byrnes, both of whom were traveling to Potsdam, had died. For Klotz’s decisive influence: Klotz interview with the author, March 4, 1977; and Henry Morgenthau III, Mostly Morgenthaus, A Family History (New York, 1991).

55.Friedman, Roots of the Future, 226; Hammer, Good Faith and Credit, 231-232. Rothberg was especially influenced by his trip to the DP camps in early 1947. Sam Rothberg report, February 1947, UJA Archives.

56.JTA, April 16, 1982; JTA, November 3, 1948; Meir interview, in Living UJA History, 13; New York Times, April 16, 1982.

57.JTA, April 16, 1982; New York Times, April 16, 1982. Montor gave his own assessment in a private letter some years later: “I know that I rendered a great service to the State of Israel, but I am not such a fool as to think that I deserve enshrinement because of it. It was something I was able to do, and it was something I urgently wanted to do. The reward that I got in terms of self-satisfaction, in terms of transformation of hopes into reality, was very substantial and it nurtures me even today.” Montor to Meltzer, March 3, 1967, A371/34, CZA.

58.Morgenthau, Mostly Morgenthaus, 411; Montor to Steinglas, February 15, 1967, A371/34, CZA; New York Times, November 8, 1945.

59.Meir interview, in Living UJA History, 12.

60.New York Times, February 12, 1999.