FROM OUR ARCHIVES
65 YEARS AGO on February 24, 1952, The Jerusalem Post reported that Golda Myerson (Meir) was the first of many Israeli cabinet members to visit New York in the next few months to help the UJA and Bonds for Israel drive, and to try to eliminate friction between their top leaders.
In a brief, friendly ceremony, held in the Foreign Ministry offices at the Kirya, the representatives of Israel and the US formally opened negotiations for an agreement under the terms of the Mutual Security Act in connection with the first US grant-inaid to Israel. Foreign minister Moshe Sharett said that by aiding Israel, the US promoted a great work of human reconstruction.
50 YEARS AGO on February 24, 1967, The Jerusalem Post reported that Israel denied the Soviet daily newspaper Izvestia’s charge that a Jewish pensioner, Solomon Dolnik, an alleged former Israeli embassy secretary who spied for Israel, received his deserts from the Moscow’s City Court. Izvestia did not say where and when the trial took place, or what the sentence was, but it was known that the maximum sentence for spying was death. The newspaper said that Dolnik pleaded guilty to collecting espionage information and spread anti-Soviet materials on instructions from the Israeli Embassy. He was accused of passing the information to the embassy’s former second secretary David Gavish.
The Israeli Embassy in Moscow and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Jerusalem denied vigorously all Izvestia’s charges and said that no one at the Moscow embassy or in Jerusalem knew anything about Dolnik.
In London, foreign minister Abba Eban told the press that there was reason to hope that a state of “relative tranquility” would prevail in the Middle East for some time to come.
25 YEARS AGO on February 24, 1992, The Jerusalem Post reported that the Hezbollah leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, vowed to continue the fight against Israel, less than 24 hours after his organization committed itself to ending sending Katyusha rocket attacks against northern settlements. “Our resistance will never end,” said Nasrallah. “The only way to achieve a lasting peace in the Middle East,” was his explanation, “was the return of all the Jewish occupiers to the lands they came from which they originally came.”
Hundreds of people packed the small cemetery of the Western Galilee township Shlomi for the funeral of five-year-old Avia Elizada, killed by a Katyusha rocket.