Golda Meir's Milwaukee

Golda Mabovitch was eight years old when she arrived in Milwaukee in nineteen oh six with her mother and sister, having crossed the Atlantic to join her father, who had come ahead to find work as a carpenter. They moved into a small apartment on Walnut Street, at the south end of Brewer's Hill. The family was poor, the winter was cold, and the English was foreign.

She enrolled at Fourth Street School and was immediately behind. Within a few years she had not only caught up but taken charge. In fourth grade she organized her first public event: a fundraiser to pay for her classmates' textbooks. The Milwaukee school district required students to purchase their own books, and many of her classmates could not afford them. She rented a hall on her own, scheduled a public meeting, announced it in the neighborhood, and ran it. She raised the money.

She graduated from Fourth Street School in nineteen twelve as class valedictorian. She went on to Milwaukee State Normal School to become a teacher. She was also, by that time, deeply involved in the Labor Zionist movement, attending meetings, organizing, arguing for a Jewish state in Palestine based not on religion but on the right of a people to live without the threat of the pogroms she had grown up fearing.

She left Milwaukee for Palestine in nineteen twenty-one, age twenty-three.

In nineteen sixty-nine, Golda Meir became the fourth Prime Minister of Israel, the first woman to hold that office. She served until nineteen seventy-four.

The school she attended on Walnut Street was renamed Golda Meir School in nineteen seventy-nine. It still operates as a Milwaukee Public Schools gifted-and-talented program. The building is a Romanesque Revival structure from eighteen eighty-nine that does not look like the origin point of a prime minister's story, and yet.