Seth Kaller, Inc.

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DAVID BEN-GURION. Autograph Letter Signed in Hebrew, to Nora Hauben, March 21, 1971. 1 p., 5 x 8¼ in.

Inventory #24956       Price: $650

Historical Background

Nora Hauben published Aktuelle Zeitgedichte: Gewidmet der Jungen Generation in 1970. In a letter from June 1973, just months before his death, Ben-Gurion gave Hauben permission to publish his photograph and his letter to her.

Translation

                                    21.3.71

Shalom u’vracha [Peace and Blessings].

I thank you – to my regret – belatedly, due to too many troubles – for sending your book ‘The Image of this Generation through Poetry and Songs.’ I read it with much excitement. Send my regards to your son. I am also a widower for three years already.^[1]

With appreciation

D. Ben-Gurion

Nora Lebenschuß Hauben (1918-2006) was born in Saxony, Germany. She survived for three years in a labor camp. In 1947 or 1948, she emigrated to Palestine, and lived in Haifa for more than ten years before moving to Ramat-Gan. Working as a saleswoman, librarian, and freelance writer, she was a founding member of an association of German-speaking writers in Israel. She married Robert Hauben (1910-1958). She wrote to many famous literary and political figures around the world and often received responses.

David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973) was born in the Kingdom of Poland, then part of the Russian Empire, as David Grün, and he studied at the University of Warsaw. In 1906, he immigrated to Palestine, which was part of the Ottoman Empire. In 1912, he moved to Constantinople to study law and adopted the Hebrew name Ben-Gurion. He supported the Ottoman Empire in World War I, but was deported to Egypt and traveled to the United States, where he remained for three years. After the Balfour Declaration of 1917, he joined the Jewish Legion of the British Army. He returned to Palestine after the war and became a leader of the Zionist movement. As head of the Jewish Agency from 1935, Ben-Gurion was effectively the leader of the Jewish population before there was a nation. He accepted the 1947 partition plan as a compromise that would establish a Jewish state, and declared the independence of the state of Israel in May 1948. After leading Israel during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Ben-Gurion won election as Prime Minister of Israel in 1948 as head of the Labour party in the Knesset. Except for nearly two years in the mid-1950s, Ben-Gurion served as Israeli Prime Minster until 1963.