Golda Meir — prime minister with roots in the Russian Empire
She was born Golda Mabovitch in Kyiv in May 1898, the seventh of eight children of Moshe Mabovitch, a carpenter and cabinetmaker, and Blume Neiditch. Five of the eight died in childhood; she and her sisters Sheyna and Clara survived. Her father's trade had earned him permission to live in Kyiv, outside the Pale of Settlement where most Jewish subjects of the empire were required to reside.
Her earliest memory, as she set it down in her autobiography, was of her father nailing boards across the front door of the house after word came that a pogrom was expected. She was about four. No pogrom came that time. The memory stayed.
In 1903 her father left for New York and the rest of the family moved to Pinsk, her mother's home town. By 1905 he had reached Milwaukee and found work in the railroad yard workshops, and in 1906 he sent for them. They landed in Quebec and went on by train. Her mother opened a grocery on the north side of the city.
She attended the Fourth Street Grade School - it carries her name now - graduated as valedictorian from North Division High School and trained as a teacher at the Milwaukee State Normal School. At seventeen she joined Poale Zion, the labour Zionist movement then active among Jewish immigrants in America, and by nineteen was travelling the country speaking for it.
In 1921 she and her husband Morris Meyerson emigrated to Mandatory Palestine and settled at Merhavia, a kibbutz in the Jezreel valley, which she later represented in the Histadrut labour federation. She was among the signatories of Israel's declaration of independence on 14 May 1948, and raised funds in the United States during the war that followed.
Her first diplomatic posting brought the arc round on itself: she was sent to Moscow in 1948 as the new state's first envoy to the Soviet Union - a woman born a subject of the tsar in Kyiv, returning to the Russian capital as an ambassador of a country that had existed for a few months.
She was minister of labour from 1949 to 1956 and foreign minister from 1956 to 1966, changing her surname from Meyerson to the Hebrew Meir on taking the latter post. In March 1969 she became the fourth prime minister of Israel, and remains the only woman to have held the office. She left it in June 1974 and died in Jerusalem in December 1978.
"Kyiv to Pinsk 1903; to Milwaukee 1906; to Mandatory Palestine 1921"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Kyiv (Ukraine)
She recorded her earliest memory as her father boarding up the door of the house against an expected pogrom. In 1948 she returned to Moscow as the first envoy of the new State of Israel to the Soviet Union.
Born Golda Mabovitch in Kyiv, then part of the Russian Empire, to the carpenter Moshe Mabovitch and Blume Neiditch. His trade had earned the family the right to live in Kyiv, outside the Pale of Settlement. The family moved to Pinsk in 1903 and emigrated to Milwaukee in 1906.
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Kyiv (Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
""I can honestly say that I was never affected by the question of the success of an undertaking. If I felt it was the right thing to do, I was for it regardless of the possible outcome.""