Golda Meir told Poland: Don't send sick or disabled Jews to Israel
VIVA PALESTINE
By Lily Galili, Haaretz Correspondent
December 10, 2009
In 1958, then-foreign minister Golda Meir raised the possibility of
preventing handicapped and sick Polish Jews from immigrating to Israel, a
recently discovered Foreign Ministry document has revealed.
"A proposal was raised in the coordination committee to inform the Polish
government that we want to institute selection in aliyah, because we cannot
continue accepting sick and handicapped people. Please give your opinion as
to whether this can be explained to the Poles without hurting immigration,"
read the document, written by Meir to Israel's ambassador to Poland, Katriel
Katz.
The letter, marked "top secret" and written in April 1958, shortly after
Meir became foreign minister, was uncovered by Prof. Szymon Rudnicki, a
Polish historian at the University of Warsaw.
In recent years, Rudnicki has been researching documents shedding light on
Israeli-Polish relations between 1945 and 1967.
The document had not been known to exist before this time, and scholars of
the mass immigration from Poland to Israel that took place from 1956 to 1958
were unaware of Israel's intent to impose a selection process on Jews
leaving Poland - survivors of the Holocaust and its death camps.
The "coordination committee" Meir refers to was a joint panel consisting of
representatives of the government and the Jewish Agency.
Rudnicki's study, undertaken together with Israeli scholars headed by Prof.
Marcos Silber of the University of Haifa, has already been published in a
book in Polish.
The Hebrew version of the book will be published in a few months. However,
the document containing the suggestion about the selection process does not
appear in the book because it did not impact relations between the two
countries.
"Although there are numerous documents on the issue of immigration, we did
not find in the archives of Israel or Poland - where they also opened the
party archive for us - any response to this request by Golda to the
ambassador in Poland," Rudnicki told Haaretz. "In this respect, the document
remains an internal matter of Israel," he said.
However, Rudnicki concedes that the content of the document surprised him as
a scholar and a Jew.
"This is a very cynical document," he said. "It is known that Golda was a
brutal politician who defended interests more than people."
Katz died more than 20 years ago, and no proof has been found that anything
was done regarding the foreign minister's query.
The 1956-1958 wave of immigration from Poland, also known as the "Gomulka
Aliyah" was the second wave of immigration from Poland after World War II.
In those years, due to a major lifting of restrictions on Jews leaving the
country, some 40,000 Polish Jews came to Israel.
In the first wave, in 1950, Poland prevented anyone who had professions
essential to Polish economy and society from leaving, including Jewish
doctors and engineers. With the rise to power of president Wadyslaw Gomulka
and his initiation of reforms at the beginning of what became known as the
"Golmuka thaw," the Polish government allowed people with professions more
in demand to leave the country, including Jews who had taken up senior
positions in the Communist Party.
"Until 1950, there was indeed selection by the Poles on the basis of
professions in demand," Rudnicki said. "After 1956 the Poles imposed no
limitations, and certainly did not intentionally send handicapped and aged
people to Israel. That is an Israeli story, not a Polish one," the historian
said.
During the years to which the document refers, waves of immigration were
also underway from other countries, placing a heavy burden on the young
state.
Statistics show that the rate of immigration at that time was similar to
that at the height of immigration from the former Soviet Union from 1990 to
1999.
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