Golda Meir was the fourth prime minister of Israel and the first woman to hold that position. She was hugely influential in the building of a Jewish and Zionist Israel, and a significant figure in world politics.

Born Golda Mabovitch in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1898, Meir grew up in the United States and died in Jerusalem in 1978. This was a common Jewish migration pattern in that era, as people escaped the persecutions of the Pale of Settlement – the areas of the Russian Empire in which Jews were allowed to settle – for a new life in the West.

Photo: Government Press Office

Having served as Israeli ambassador to the Soviet Union, minister of foreign affairs, minister of labor, and minister of internal affairs, Meir became prime minister in 1969. She held this role until 1974, resigning after the end of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.

In her late teens, Meir joined the Labor Zionist movement in the United States. After finishing school she traveled the country selling their message.

At 20, she was a speaker at the first American Jewish Congress in Philadelphia in 1918. Here, the impact of the Balfour Declaration, in which in 1917 the British government had declared support for the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people, was discussed.

Photo: Government Press Office

Meir committed fully to the Zionist idea that Jewish life outside of Israel was incomplete and inadequate. It was this ideological position that led her to move to Israel, to live on a kibbutz. When she became foreign minister in 1956, she changed her married name, Meyerson, to the Hebraicised version, Meir.

Meir was one of the signatories of Israel’s Declaration of Independence. After the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, she continued to play a formative role in shaping Israel’s domestic and foreign policy.