Historic 1926 Golda Meir letter to be auctioned
Starting bid of £4,800 for literary treasure written by the first woman to serve as Israel's prime minister
A typed two-page letter signed by Golda Meir, dated May 16, 1928, is set to be auctioned in Los Angeles on January 30.
Penned shortly after Meir’s move to then-Palestine as a young Zionist leader, the correspondence, addressed to the “Hachlutz” Histadrut (a Jewish labour movement), offers a glimpse into the early Zionist endeavours and the struggles of the Jewish labour movements.
Written in Tel Aviv, Meir discusses the halt in immigration and its impact on the agricultural settlements, the efforts of the Female Workers Council and the need for continued immigration and establishment of new settlements.
It is signed by Meir, ”Golda Myerson”, the name she used in her youth, and countersigned by her colleague Elisheva Kaplan, wife of future Prime Minister Levi Eshkol.
Also going under the hammer is a National Medal of Science awarded to Kindertransport survivor Walter Kohn in 1988 by President Ronald Reagan. Kohn, who died in 2016, also won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the medal sold for £368k in January 2022.
Kohn was born in 1923 in Vienna. After being transported to Canada, he enrolled in the University of Toronto and studied applied mathematics. He earned a PhD from Harvard in Physics. Kohn was a research professor of physics at UC Santa Barbara and was the founding director of the campus’s Institute for Theoretical Physics, now KITP. He also taught at the University of California San Diego from 1960-1979.
For further information, contact auctioneers Nate Sanders.
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