So, what did it mean if she actually hadn’t met Meir before 1948? Was Ruth an outright liar? Had she inadvertently created a false memory, after so many people had probably asked later if she had ever met Meir in Israel? Her memory was so specific and so rich in detail that it seemed like it must have happened, in some way.
“To Golda and Ruth,” my mother and I toasted.
When I returned home, I scoured the Jewish Tribune myself and confirmed that Meir was not in San Francisco in 1947. Her biographers were also in agreement: she was definitely in Palestine at that time, although she had embarked on a successful barnstorming tour of the US in early 1948, after Ruth left San Francisco for Palestine, the two passing each other like ships in the night. However, I came across an interesting story on the front page of the Jewish Tribune. A woman named Yehudith Simchonit, a Pioneer Women delegate from Palestine, was scheduled to speak in San Francisco on November 30:
Mrs. Simchonit comes on an urgent mission as the representative of the 70,000 women organized into the Working Women’s Council of Palestine . . . An outstanding leader of the Women’s labor movement in Palestine, Mrs. Simchonit has devoted more than 25 years to pioneering among the workers in the colonies and towns of the Jewish Homeland.8
Was this the woman who inspired Ruth? There is no doubt that they would have met in San Francisco while Ruth performed her duties, which included escorting dignitaries around the city and planning their speaking engagements. Coming just a day after the UN’s vote, Simchonit’s talk may have been overshadowed by all of the excitement, perhaps a perfect time for the two women to slip away and go get a drink. Because Simchonit had a similar background as Meir, perhaps Ruth mixed up the two women in her mind later in life. Or more likely, Ruth the raconteuse just wanted to tell a great story, even if it was a fib, to captivate her friends and neighbors.
As I scrolled through the Jewish Tribune, I came across a heartbreaking article on the front page of the first issue of the new year, January 2, 1948. I already knew the story, but it was no less shocking to see it in print.
Ruth Rappaport to Palestine
When her brother-in-law was killed at Holon December 23, Miss Ruth Rappaport, currently with the San Francisco Zionist District, decided to return to Palestine. She is leaving here by plane on Saturday, January 3, en route to Lydda Field, Palestine.
Miss Rappaport is going to see her sister, Mrs. Miriam Schneider, whose husband, Max, was killed in the fighting at Holon on December 23. Mr. Schneider, a native of Germany, went to Palestine in 1933, and lived in the collective of Givath Hashlosha until 1938, when he and his wife moved to Jerusalem. Since that time he has been actively engaged in home defense.
Holon was one of the towns where the British disarmed all Jews, members of Haganah and the home guard, when fighting started some days ago.
Miss Rappaport is planning to stay three months, and will live at House Ettinger, Kirath Shmuel in Jerusalem.
Prior to coming to San Francisco last June, Miss Rappaport was the editor of the Transcript in Seattle, where she was active in the Zionist work of the Community. She is past president of the Junior Hadassah and secretary of the Seattle Zionist Council.
Max Schneider, 31, a brother-in-law of Ruth Rappaport, a member of the Haganah home defense force, was killed in Holon, Palestine, a settlement where the British disarmed Jews. He had four brothers, all in Haganah service now.
At the end of December 1947, Ruth’s sister Mirjam sent a telegram to her asking if she would come to Palestine and stay with her while she grieved for her husband. On December 26 Ruth wrote a resignation letter to George Edelstein, president of the San Francisco office of the Zionist Organization of America, and apologized for her sudden departure.9
In her oral history, Ruth did not mention her brother-in-law’s death as her reason for going to Palestine. There was her Golda Meir story, of course, but she said also that she went as an “advance party of one” for the Zionist Emergency Council, to “have all the rich San Francisco Jews go on a mission—now they call them ‘missions.’” She went on: “We were going to have all the people who gave money and time to work towards partition. We were going to have this publicity flight: DP! Destination Palestine. Oh, weren’t we clever . . . And I was dispatched.”10
Regardless of the exact reasons Ruth went to Palestine, it was a chance for her to finally see it for herself and to live out her ideals as a Zionist. She had never desired to live on a kibbutz, but she thought that perhaps Palestine could be an opportunity to advance her career while placing her at the center of a momentous event in modern history. She had ambitions to travel around the country, learn more about the people there, and keep an extensive diary that she might use to write a book or go on a speaking tour later in the United States. If anything, she could probably pick up work as a journalist or photographer and meet other people in this field who would give her leads or help her climb the ladder to a position she felt was worthy of her intelligence and skills. Only a very small number of Jewish American women made the commitment to go to Palestine in 1948.11 Most of them were single and deeply committed Zionists. Historians Shulamit Reinharz and Mark A. Raider have noted, “Those who did emigrate were seen as heroines or, just as often, incomprehensible.”12
Unsure of how long she would stay in Palestine, Ruth left San Francisco for Chicago on January 3, 1948. W. Zev Bronner, Rabbi Franklin Cohn, roommates Zamira and Sharon, and others had a going-away party and came with her to the airport to see her off. From the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago, she wrote of her shame that she was hoping that her ex-boyfriend Jim would come to see her in Chicago. After calling him but realizing “he was out sleeping with some other dame,” she finally reached him. He said he might come if he could find the money. She complai
ned, “I don’t know why I waste my thoughts, time and money on him. Except that I cannot forget him. I sure know how to mess up my life.” Jim did not come to meet her, and the next day she sent him a telegram in which she wrote, “Enta Iben Kalb,” roughly translated from Arabic as “You are a son of a bitch.” Ruth met up with a friend she had known in Zurich. She informed Ruth that her first crush, Roger Garfunkel, had gotten married. Ruth decided, “Well I got over him, maybe I’ll get over Jim too.”13
From Chicago, Ruth flew to Washington, DC, where she stayed with her uncle Irving Rappaport, aunt Bertha, and cousin Marvin and “found out who all is left in Viynita [Vyzhnytsya]”—in other words, which of her father’s relatives had survived the Holocaust in the Ukraine. From Philadelphia, she flew to Newfoundland, Ireland, and Paris, where she visited her sister Clara and her nephew Guy for just a few hours. Ruth also stopped in Geneva on the way to Cairo.14 But for “political reasons,” she wrote in a letter, they landed not in Egypt as planned but in Lydda (today Lod), a predominantly Arabic town southeast of Tel Aviv. Because of gunfire, Ruth and other travelers were stuck overnight in the airport. Her arrival wasn’t glamorous, and it wasn’t what she had expected, but after pondering, imagining, and waiting for this moment her entire life, she had finally made aliyah.
Part V:
It Is All Such a Vicious Circle
PALESTINE/ISRAEL, 1948–1949
Chapter 17
The day after her arrival in Palestine, Ruth took a short flight to Tel Aviv, where she was finally able to reunite with Mirjam. They traveled to the home of Mirjam’s sister-in-law, Hadassah, in Holon, which was in the middle of guerrilla warfare. Although both Jews and Arabs had been fighting against the British in resistance movements for decades, now Arabs were launching attacks against Jewish settlements in protest of the Partition Plan. The Haganah, which was undergoing a transformation from a paramilitary organization into an official army, retaliated against these attacks, and now a new civil war was underway.
Ruth and Mirjam had not seen each other since 1936, when Ruth was thirteen and Mirjam came back to Germany for a visit after making Palestine her permanent home in 1933.1 Although they had probably written letters to each other, their ten-year age gap, being half sisters (or “stepsisters,” as Ruth sometimes put it), the upheaval of World War II, and spending their formative years in two such vastly different places would define their relationship. While Mirjam had married young and committed herself to a spartan Orthodox Jewish lifestyle in Palestine, Ruth had taken a different path, partly by chance but mostly of her own free will. Although a committed Zionist, she had fully immersed herself in American culture, taken some college classes, and eventually held several different challenging and interesting jobs as a single woman both during and after the war.
Ruth stayed with the Schneiders for a few uncomfortable weeks. Besides Hadassah, the family included Max’s brothers Fred and Ben, who lived in Jerusalem. Ruth explained the conditions in Holon: “One never quite [knew] if a bullet would come into the house or not. In the morning it became a steady routine to look at the bullet holes on the outside of the house.”2 It saddened her that Hadassah’s children played with cartridge casings instead of marbles.
Reflecting on her two weeks in Holon, she commented on Hadassah’s “proletarian poverty” and how everyone had been so depressed about Max’s death that she was motivated to leave after two weeks. She did not feel very close to Mirjam or believe that she could really help her. Fred, who spoke English very well, escorted Ruth around the city and to Tel Aviv, where she visited with the parents of a few friends from the West Coast and tried to seek out a job. Fred soon fell in love with Ruth. She admitted that she had some initial attraction to him but that it ended for her there: “It not only became burdensome for me with his overpowering emotion, adoration, servility and concern, but it enraged Miriam who in her state of nerves became extremely jealous of [me] and [intimated] that I was robbing her of the last bit of Max!”3
Ruth left for Jerusalem, where Mirjam, Fred, Ben, and Rita, Ben’s wife, were living. A mixed city of Christians, Jews, and Muslims, it was a symbolic place for all three religious groups and the center of an intensely violent struggle for territory. The Old City was divided into sections according to religion, and recently arrived Jews had settled in West Jerusalem, outside the Old City’s walls. Ruth hoped to find stories to write there as a correspondent. On a harrowing bus trip into the city by convoy, the British troops searched Ruth and the other travelers, then watched as Arabs shot and threw grenades at the bus and other cars a few miles outside the city. Also on the bus was the chief rabbi of Palestine, who recited the Tehillim (Psalms) for the other passengers.4
Ruth lived with Fred in an apartment on King George Street, and Mirjam may have lived in the same building. “Under normal conditions,” she described the building they occupied, “[it] would be a lovely place . . . one of the most modern of Jerusalem’s six-story apartment houses. My balcony faces the Old City . . . Citadel of David etc. etc.”5 Although she had a view of the Old City, she could not visit it. Jews were banned from that part of the city, except for a small number who lived there and who would soon be forced out. The situation in Jerusalem was even worse than in Holon. There were constant firefights, and Ruth described her furniture as riddled with bullets. Living in Jerusalem at this time tested the limits of her ability to survive under traumatic and stressful conditions. She explained:
Since we have a critical water shortage, we have to go down each day and buy four gallons of water, when it is available, that is, and since there is no electricity, the elevator does not work, so I have to carry my buckets up six flights of stairs… and there is no gas or petroleum either, so I cannot cook anything, but then there are no groceries available, so I don’t have to worry about not being able to cook them, and since there is no mail, I need not worry about no electricity, for there is nothing to read.6