Auction 68 Jewish and Israeli History and Culture
By Kedem
Sep 19, 2019
8 Ramban St, Jerusalem., Israel
The auction has ended

LOT 181:

A Letter Handwritten and Signed by David Ben-Gurion – London, June 1945 – A Call to Act for the Immigration of Jews ...

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A Letter Handwritten and Signed by David Ben-Gurion – London, June 1945 – A Call to Act for the Immigration of Jews to Palestine
A letter handwritten and signed by David Ben-Gurion, sent to Zvi Maimon in the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem. London, June 1945.
A letter by David Ben-Gurion to Zvi Maimon, a stenographer in the Jewish Agency who served, for several years, as Ben-Gurion's personal secretary. The first part of the letter contains a long list of dozens of books that Ben-Gurion sent to Palestine, and the second part deals with the need to act for immigration to Palestine: "I see that the urgency of a Zionist conference was not appreciated in Jerusalem. We cannot continue on the basis of the White Paper and we shall not wait for the managers of the Colonial Office to run out of permits. However, this announcement to His Majesty's Government must come from an authorized conference (not formally, but politically authorized) and an authorized conference will be one that the movement as it is now will take part in – especially the remnants of European Jewry […] it seems that Jerusalem cannot see the forest for the trees …" (Hebrew). The letter is signed: "D.B.G" (Hebrew).
In 1942, David Ben-Gurion, then the chairman of the Jewish Agency, was one of the initiators and organizers of the Biltmore Conference, a conference of the Zionist organizations which decided on an action plan and demanded to open the gates of Palestine to mass immigration and to establish a Jewish state. After the war, when it became clear that the British government would not revise its previous policy of objecting to the Jewish settlement of Palestine, Ben-Gurion led a strategy of fighting the British government. In June 1945 (shortly after writing the present letter), he travelled to the USA to raise funds for purchasing weapons and machines for the military industry. In the Zionist Congress that took place during late 1946, Ben-Gurion was handed over the responsibility for the defense department of the Jewish Agency. For about two months, he studied combat tactics and the structure of the Haganah and its needs in order to turn the Haganah into an army prepared for a possible war with the Arab world.
[1] leaf (aerogram), approx. 25X20 cm. Good condition. Fold lines and minor creases. Minor blemishes.

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