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Golda Meir may be having a moment, yet her memory endures in a Midtown plaza
(New York Jewish Week) — Golda Meir may have been known as the Iron Lady for her steady leadership of Israel, but her lasting mark on New York City was made in bronze.
A bronze bust of Meir is located in a plaza between 39th and 40th streets on Broadway in Manhattan. Since 1979 it has been known as Golda Meir Memorial Square.
The bust had already been commissioned when the plaza was dedicated in honor of Meir, Israel’s fourth and so far only female prime minister who died in 1978. Malcolm Hoenlein, then executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, consulted with Clara Stein, Meir’s sister, before approaching the city with a proposal for the square.
“We felt that for it to really be representative and to have a personal significance, a sign was not enough,” Hoenlein told the New York Jewish Week.
Meir visited — and extolled — New York multiple times before and after becoming Israel’s prime minister in 1969. She served in the role until 1974, when she resigned following Israel’s flawed but ultimately successful performance in the Yom Kippur War.
The last years of her life are getting another look with the new biopic about Meir’s life, “Golda,” starring Helen Mirren, set to hit theaters Friday. The film, directed by Oscar-winning Israeli filmmaker Guy Nattiv, takes place during the three-week period of the Yom Kippur War and focuses on Meir’s involvement in the war and her legacy.
It was just after Meir’s death that Hoenlein embarked on a plan to memorialize her. He approached Jack Weiler, an honorary chairman of JCRC who owned a building on 39th and Broadway, who offered the location for the plaza.
“He was very enthusiastic because he knew Golda well,” Hoenlein said of Weiler.
Meanwhile, sculpturist Beatrice Goldfine, who also knew Meir, volunteered to contribute the bust. Approximately 2 feet tall, it rested for decades atop a granite pedestal before being relocated more recently to a plinth surrounded by decorative foliage inside the plaza.
Hoenlein was drawn to the plaza because of its location in the heart of the Garment District — an area that was once dense with tens of thousands of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Another draw to the area was the Jewish garment worker sculpture just one avenue away.
When he chose the site, people warned Hoenlein that the Garment District’s demographics were changing, and the Jewish presence was starting to decline. “They were very concerned that [the bust] would be vandalized all the time,” he said. “The fact is it has never been vandalized. There was not one single anti-Israel or antisemitic attack on the location.”
The only damage to the bust has, he said, been the result of pigeons who he assumes “are not lined up with any particular ideology.”
The addition of the sculpture also aimed to make the plaza a gathering space. Hoenlein recalled using it as a space for various pro-Israel rallies over the years.
Meir frequently visited New York. She called it “a haven of refuge” for Jewish people from “the tears, fears, humiliation, degradation and death that was the share of Jews in Eastern Europe,” in a 1969 visit to New York covered by JTA.
During that three-day stay, Mayor John Lindsay presented Meir with the key to the city and the Gold Medal of the City, the highest award.
“Israel has conquered the desert and defeated it, but today, a single woman has conquered the heart of New York. New York is yours,” he told her.
“She visited New York on numerous occasions. She had close ties and many close friends, people that she knew well,” Hoenlein said.
In 1947, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion planned to go on a fundraising tour in the United States, but Meir insisted that she go instead.
“Two days later, with no more baggage than the thin spring dress she wore and the handbag she clutched in her hand, she arrived in New York on a bitter winter’s night, so precipitate had her departure been that she had not had the time to take the convoy up to Jerusalem to fetch a change of clothes,” according to the Yeshiva University Library’s blog. “The woman who had come to New York in search of millions of dollars had in her purse that evening exactly one ten-dollar bill. When a puzzled customs agent asked her how she intended to support herself in the United States, she replied simply, ‘I have family here.’”
Meir visited the Modern Orthodox flagship on two occasions: in 1963, addressing the alumni association as Israel’s Foreign Minister, and in 1973, as Israel’s prime minister, to receive an honorary degree.
Golda Meir was born in Kyiv in 1898, but moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with her family in 1906. She lived in the Midwestern city until 1921, when she emigrated to Palestine with her husband.
The new biopic isn’t the first portrayal of Meir’s life. In New York, there was the 1977 Broadway production “Golda” by William Gibson that Meir attended at the Morosco Theater in New York and called “terrific!” Gibson revisited Meir with a 2003 one-woman Broadway show, “Golda’s Balcony,” starring Jewish actress Tova Feldshuh as Meir.
Meir had strong feelings about the city. Coming from a family of refugees with roots in Czarist Russia, “The first lesson of what democracy really means, I learned here,” Meir said during one of her New York visits.
There’s a plaque in Meir’s honor inside a Milwaukee library, and a school named for her there; her only known surviving residence in the United States, in Denver, has been turned into a small museum after narrowly escaping demolition in the 1980s. Meanwhile, a life-size statue of her sits on a park bench in Tel Aviv with one depicting David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, and her legacy looms large in Ukraine, where leaders and soldiers alike say they take inspiration from Meir’s fierceness in fighting for her own country’s survival.
But Golda Meir Memorial Square is by the far the most-visited site dedicated to her — even if most of the people passing through don’t know the significance of the location.
“New York was the center of Jewish life, it still is, and is the appropriate place to have this kind of commemorative site,” Hoenlein said. “I don’t think that there’s another one like it in the United States that is a gathering point and perpetuating Meir’s memory for over 40 years.”
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The post Golda Meir may be having a moment, yet her memory endures in a Midtown plaza appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Israel Blocks Ramallah Meeting with Arab Ministers, Israeli Official Says
A closed Israeli military gate stands near Ramallah in the West Bank, February 18, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
Israel will not allow a planned meeting in the Palestinian administrative capital of Ramallah, in the West Bank, to go ahead, an Israeli official said on Saturday, after Arab ministers planning to attend were stopped from coming.
The move, days after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government announced one of the largest expansions of settlements in the West Bank in years, underlined escalating tensions over the issue of international recognition of a future Palestinian state.
Saturday’s meeting comes ahead of an international conference, co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia, that is due to be held in New York on June 17-20 to discuss the issue of Palestinian statehood, which Israel fiercely opposes.
The delegation of senior Arab officials due to visit Ramallah – including the Jordanian, Egyptian, Saudi Arabian and Bahraini foreign ministers – postponed the visit after “Israel’s obstruction of it,” Jordan’s foreign ministry said in a statement, adding that the block was “a clear breach of Israel’s obligations as an occupying force.”
The ministers required Israeli consent to travel to the West Bank from Jordan.
An Israeli official said the ministers intended to take part in “a provocative meeting” to discuss promoting the establishment of a Palestinian state.
“Such a state would undoubtedly become a terrorist state in the heart of the land of Israel,” the official said. “Israel will not cooperate with such moves aimed at harming it and its security.”
A Saudi source told Reuters that Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al-Saud had delayed a planned trip to the West Bank.
Israel has come under increasing pressure from the United Nations and European countries which favour a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, under which an independent Palestinian state would exist alongside Israel.
French President Emmanuel Macron said on Friday that recognizing a Palestinian state was not only a “moral duty but a political necessity.”
Palestinians want the West Bank territory, which was seized by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war, as the core of a future state along with Gaza and East Jerusalem.
But the area is now criss-crossed with settlements that have squeezed some 3 million Palestinians into pockets increasingly cut off from each other though a network of military checkpoints.
Defense Minister Israel Katz said the announcement this week of 22 new settlements in the West Bank was an “historic moment” for settlements and “a clear message to Macron.” He said recognition of a Palestinian state would be “thrown into the dustbin of history.”
The post Israel Blocks Ramallah Meeting with Arab Ministers, Israeli Official Says first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Gaza Aid Supplies Hit by Looting as Hamas Ceasefire Response Awaited
Palestinians carry aid supplies which they received from the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, in the central Gaza Strip, May 29, 2025. REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
Armed men hijacked dozens of aid trucks entering the Gaza Strip overnight and hundreds of desperate Palestinians joined in to take supplies, local aid groups said on Saturday as officials waited for Hamas to respond to the latest ceasefire proposals.
The incident was the latest in a series that has underscored the shaky security situation hampering the delivery of aid into Gaza, following the easing of a weeks-long Israeli blockade earlier this month.
US President Donald Trump said on Friday he believed a ceasefire agreement was close but Hamas has said it is still studying the latest proposals from his special Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff. The White House said on Thursday that Israel had agreed to the proposals.
The proposals would see a 60-day truce and the exchange of 28 of the 58 hostages still held in Gaza for more than 1,200 Palestinian prisoners and detainees, along with the entry of humanitarian aid into the enclave.
On Saturday, the Israeli military, which relaunched its air and ground campaign in March following a two-month truce, said it was continuing to hit targets in Gaza, including sniper posts and had killed what it said was the head of a Hamas weapons manufacturing site.
The campaign has cleared large areas along the boundaries of the Gaza Strip, squeezing the population of more than 2 million into an ever narrower section along the coast and around the southern city of Khan Younis.
Israel imposed a blockade on all supplies entering the enclave at the beginning of March in an effort to weaken Hamas and has found itself under increasing pressure from an international community shocked by the increasingly desperate humanitarian situation the blockade has created.
The United Nations said on Friday the situation in Gaza is the worst since the start of the war began 19 months ago, with the entire population facing the risk of famine despite a resumption of limited aid deliveries earlier this month.
Israel has been allowing a limited number of trucks from the World Food Program and other international groups to bring flour to bakeries in Gaza but deliveries have been hampered by repeated incidents of looting.
At the same time, a separate system, run by a US-backed group called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has been delivering meals and food packages at three designated distribution sites.
However, aid groups have refused to cooperate with the GHF, which they say is not neutral, and say the amount of aid allowed in falls far short of the needs of a population at risk of famine.
“The aid that’s being sent now makes a mockery of the mass tragedy unfolding under our watch,” Philippe Lazzarini, head of the main U.N. relief organization for Palestinians, said in a message on the social media platform X.
NO BREAD IN WEEKS
The World Food Program said it brought 77 trucks carrying flour into Gaza overnight and early on Saturday and all of them were stopped on the way, with food taken by hungry people.
“After nearly 80 days of a total blockade, communities are starving and they are no longer willing to watch food pass them by,” it said in a statement.
Amjad Al-Shawa, head of an umbrella group representing Palestinian aid groups, said the dire situation was being exploited by armed groups which were attacking some of the aid convoys.
He said hundreds more trucks were needed and accused Israel of a “systematic policy of starvation.”
Overnight on Saturday, he said trucks had been stopped by armed groups near Khan Younis as they were headed towards a World Food Programme warehouse in Deir Al-Balah in central Gaza and hundreds of desperate people had carried off supplies.
“We could understand that some are driven by hunger and starvation, some may not have eaten bread in several weeks, but we can’t understand armed looting, and it is not acceptable at all,” he said.
Israel says it is facilitating aid deliveries, pointing to its endorsement of the new GHF distribution centers and its consent for other aid trucks to enter Gaza.
Instead it accuses Hamas of stealing supplies intended for civilians and using them to entrench its hold on Gaza, which it had been running since 2007.
The post Gaza Aid Supplies Hit by Looting as Hamas Ceasefire Response Awaited first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Hamas Seeks Changes in US Gaza Proposal; Witkoff Calls Response ‘Unacceptable’
US President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy-designate Steve Witkoff gives a speech at the inaugural parade inside Capital One Arena on the inauguration day of Trump’s second presidential term, in Washington, DC, Jan. 20, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Barria
Hamas said on Saturday it was seeking amendments to a US-backed proposal for a temporary ceasefire with Israel in Gaza, but President Donald Trump’s envoy rejected the group’s response as “totally unacceptable.”
The Palestinian terrorist group said it was willing to release 10 living hostages and hand over the bodies of 18 dead in exchange for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons. But Hamas reiterated demands for an end to the war and withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, conditions Israel has rejected.
A Hamas official described the group’s response to the proposals from Trump’s special Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff as “positive” but said it was seeking some amendments. The official did not elaborate on the changes being sought by the group.
“This response aims to achieve a permanent ceasefire, a complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, and to ensure the flow of humanitarian aid to our people in the Strip,” Hamas said in a statement.
The proposals would see a 60-day truce and the exchange of 28 of the 58 hostages still held in Gaza for more than 1,200 Palestinian prisoners and detainees, along with the entry of humanitarian aid into the enclave.
A Palestinian official familiar with the talks told Reuters that among amendments Hamas is seeking is the release of the hostages in three phases over the 60-day truce and more aid distribution in different areas. Hamas also wants guarantees the deal will lead to a permanent ceasefire, the official said.
There was no immediate response from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office to the Hamas statement.
Israel has previously rejected Hamas’ conditions, instead demanding the complete disarmament of the group and its dismantling as a military and governing force, along with the return of all 58 remaining hostages.
Trump said on Friday he believed a ceasefire agreement was close after the latest proposals, and the White House said on Thursday that Israel had agreed to the terms.
Saying he had received Hamas’ response, Witkoff wrote in a posting on X: “It is totally unacceptable and only takes us backward. Hamas should accept the framework proposal we put forward as the basis for proximity talks, which we can begin immediately this coming week.”
On Saturday, the Israeli military said it had killed Mohammad Sinwar, Hamas’ Gaza chief on May 13, confirming what Netanyahu said earlier this week.
Sinwar, the younger brother of Yahya Sinwar, the group’s deceased leader and mastermind of the October 2023 attack on Israel, was the target of an Israeli strike on a hospital in southern Gaza. Hamas has neither confirmed nor denied his death.
The Israeli military, which relaunched its air and ground campaign in March following a two-month truce, said on Saturday it was continuing to hit targets in Gaza, including sniper posts and had killed what it said was the head of a Hamas weapons manufacturing site.
The campaign has cleared large areas along the boundaries of the Gaza Strip, squeezing the population of more than 2 million into an ever narrower section along the coast and around the southern city of Khan Younis.
Israel imposed a blockade on all supplies entering the enclave at the beginning of March in an effort to weaken Hamas and has found itself under increasing pressure from an international community shocked by the desperate humanitarian situation the blockade has created.
On Saturday, aid groups said dozens of World Food Program trucks carrying flour to Gaza bakeries had been hijacked by armed groups and subsequently looted by people desperate for food after weeks of mounting hunger.
“After nearly 80 days of a total blockade, communities are starving and they are no longer willing to watch food pass them by,” the WFP said in a statement.
‘A MOCKERY’
The incident was the latest in a series that has underscored the shaky security situation hampering the delivery of aid into Gaza, following the easing of a weeks-long Israeli blockade earlier this month.
The United Nations said on Friday the situation in Gaza is the worst since the start of the war 19 months ago, with the entire population facing the risk of famine despite a resumption of limited aid deliveries earlier this month.
“The aid that’s being sent now makes a mockery of the mass tragedy unfolding under our watch,” Philippe Lazzarini, head of the main U.N. relief organization for Palestinians, said in a message on X.
Israel has been allowing a limited number of trucks from the World Food Program and other international groups to bring flour to bakeries in Gaza but deliveries have been hampered by repeated incidents of looting.
A separate system, run by a US-backed group called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, has been delivering meals and food packages at three designated distribution sites.
However, aid groups have refused to cooperate with the GHF, which they say is not neutral, and say the amount of aid allowed in falls far short of the needs of a population at risk of famine.
Amjad Al-Shawa, head of an umbrella group representing Palestinian aid groups, said the dire situation was being exploited by armed groups which were attacking some of the aid convoys.
He said hundreds more trucks were needed and accused Israel of a “systematic policy of starvation.”
Israel denies operating a policy of starvation and says it is facilitating aid deliveries, pointing to its endorsement of the new GHF distribution centers and its consent for other aid trucks to enter Gaza.
Instead it accuses Hamas of stealing supplies intended for civilians and using them to entrench its hold on Gaza, which it had been running since 2007.
Hamas denies looting supplies and has executed a number of suspected looters.
The post Hamas Seeks Changes in US Gaza Proposal; Witkoff Calls Response ‘Unacceptable’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.