Golda Meir proposed halting aliyah of disabled Polish Jews

Ha'aretz
In 1958, then-foreign minister Golda Meir raised the possibility of preventing handicapped and sick Polish Jews from immigrating to Israel, a recently discovered Foreign Ministry document has revealed.

"A proposal was raised in the coordination committee to inform the Polish government that we want to institute selection in aliyah, because we cannot continue accepting sick and handicapped people. Please give your opinion as to whether this can be explained to the Poles without hurting immigration," read the document, written by Meir to Israel's ambassador to Poland, Katriel Katz.

The letter, marked "top secret" and written in April 1958, shortly after Meir became foreign minister, was uncovered by Prof. Szymon Rudnicki, a Polish historian at the University of Warsaw.

In recent years, Rudnicki has been researching documents shedding light on Israeli-Polish relations between 1945 and 1967.


........Rudnicki concedes that the content of the document surprised him as a scholar and a Jew.

"This is a very cynical document," he said. "It is known that Golda was a brutal politician who defended interests more than people." Full story