Golda Meir told Poland: Don't send sick or disabled Jews to Israel
Johnny Asia
Golda Meir told Poland: Don't send sick or disabled Jews to Israel
By Lily Galili, Haaretz Correspondent
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.