by Kate Stewart
When I first heard this story, I wondered if it was really true. Of course Ruth would want to be associated with this famous woman, the “Iron Lady of Israel,” a feminist hero to women around the world, despite her questionable leadership in the 1960s and ’70s. But in the 1940s, Goldie Meyerson, as she was then known, was not famous outside Zionist circles. A leader of the Jewish Agency, a worldwide organization founded to assist Jews who wanted to move to Israel, she visited the United States on several fundraising trips in the 1930s. Was she actually in San Francisco between July and December 1947, when Ruth was living there?
My mom and I met up for another American Library Association conference in 2015, this time in San Francisco. We arrived early and stayed in Berkeley for two days. While I went through local Zionist collections at Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, she looked through microfilm in the basement of the Doe Library next door, scanning PDFs of the Jewish Tribune for me. I told her to look for Golda Meir’s visit, but she didn’t see her name, even under her former name of Meyerson or Meirson, during the right timeframe. The next day we headed downtown to the conference, where I manned my station at the Library of Congress booth in the exhibit hall and she ransacked the free books and giveaways. One evening we decided to go up to the Mark Hopkins Hotel. Trudging up Nob Hill, we stopped at Ruth’s first apartment on Pine Street to get a photo, then pushed farther on to the hotel a few blocks away. We took the elevator up to the Top of the Mark, where a jazz band played and people shimmied on the dance floor. We were seated in the corner with a magnificent view of the south side of San Francisco. We ordered a cheese plate and wine and mulled over this riddle of Ruth’s.
I was certain they had met later in Israel, but Ruth had recorded in her diary there that she “was very impressed by the speech given by Golda Meyerson whom I heard for the first time.”7 Did that mean the first time in Israel? Or had she met her before but hadn’t seen her give a speech? What if she was misremembering in old age, and they had met for the first time in Seattle, not San Francisco? Could she have confused the Mark Hopkins Hotel with some other rooftop bar in Seattle? Ruth later worked occasionally for Zionist organizations in San Francisco when she returned in the 1950s. Could she have met Meir then?
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
She wrote to W. Zev Bronner in San Francisco: “It is hard to adequately put into words the hopelessness and [ugliness] and sordidness of the situation to anyone who has not seen it in person. And yet, I do not wish it to anybody to live here under present conditions . . . I am beginning to feel as if living in San Francisco or Seattle was living in a fairy land compared with this nightmare here.”7
On February 22, Ben Yehuda Street was bombed, just a few blocks away from where Ruth lived. She wrote an article describing the wreckage and the tragic story of a five-year-old girl who survived but lost her family. She enclosed it in a letter to Victor Bloom, the owner of the Jewish Tribune newspaper in San Francisco, asking if he was interested in publishing a weekly dispatch from her and requesting that he send press credentials.8 Although she didn’t hear back from him and had no idea if he had published her article, she sent more. Another article of hers did appear in the Jewish Tribune in March under the title “Jerusalem, a Besieged City,” along with her letter to Bloom.9 This one described her visit to a newspaper office and how one hour afterward the man she had spoken with there was shot on a bus. Ruth wrote that the British did not report or count his murder or the murder of other civilians in Jerusalem. She closed her letter to Bloom with a plea to the Tribune’s audience: “I do hope that the article will convey something to your readers, and help to move them to action, or if they are active, to more action.”10 Ruth was also unsure of whether the “Destination Palestine” trip sponsored by the Jewish Tribune would happen.11 As she remembered it later, she sent a telegram to those planning the trip that said, “War broke out, stay home.”12
As in Leipzig, Ruth once again faced a dangerous situation and, instead of avoiding it, wanted to witness it and describe it to others. Reflecting on this much later, she stated, “People sort of sometimes say . . . I seem to be war-prone. And I frequently get this business of, aren’t you scared? And you know, I’m not scared. You know why? I pretend I’m a spectator. I’m not in this war; I’m watching this war. And that gets me off the hook—I don’t have to worry
.”13 Ruth lamented the constant gunshots, bombings, rationing, and the depressed mood of Jews in Palestine. The frequent battles frayed her nerves, but she never felt as though she would be killed or hurt. She told her friends that she hoped the US would get involved in the conflict and that every American Jew should do more to support the new state.
Because she had departed so suddenly from San Francisco, Ruth had left many of her belongings in her apartment, but she had planned on her friends and roommates sending her some things and packing and shipping the rest to Seattle. Ruth ultimately lost many items and grew frustrated with people whom she had trusted to carry out these tasks. Her letters also reveal her demanding personality: asking friends to do laundry lists of favors, including shipping food to her sister Clara, developing her negatives, contacting the IRS about her new situation, and shipping clothing and supplies she could not get in Jerusalem. She always enclosed blank checks or offered to reimburse any expenses and encouraged friends to send items that she could sell for them in Jerusalem at a big markup. At least one friend responded exasperated that Ruth expected too much and had left a mess for others to pick up. Coupled with many letters lost in the mail, Ruth began to doubt if she had any real friends in San Francisco.14
Ruth had accumulated substantial savings along with her inheritance from her uncle Carl. But due to the high cost of living, she was losing money quickly. She was soon desperate for a job and inquired around Tel Aviv and Jerusalem for journalism positions. Before she left the US, many people had given her names of people in Palestine to contact about jobs, but these opportunities did not pan out. She did not know Hebrew, and many employers did not want to hire during the uncertainty of the war. She also blamed Fred for holding her back in her search for a job.15 In the spring of 1948, she was planning on coming back to the US in July unless she got a permanent, decent job. In April, Ruth was offered a trial job to replace an Acme United Press photographer who was killed in Jerusalem. She wrote in her diary about this opportunity: “It pays very little, but promises to be interesting—although I know so little about photography it is not even funny—but then, I did not know anything about the Transcript job and got it and kept it.”16 She was also concerned that she would not be able to keep any of the negatives or prints she shot, which she hoped she would be able to use later for a speaking tour. She made plans to photograph a Haganah training camp for Acme United Press, but worried about her decision: “All seems to be settled, except that something in me is too apathetic for me to pull myself together & to become enthusiastic. I think I’m scared of this job, I don’t feel equipped for it. I am not afraid of the danger but of the flopping.”17 But she managed to confront these fears and took photos of which she was proud. She attended press conferences in Jerusalem where she met other journalists and leaders of the Jewish forces.
