At 93, former ambassador and MK Esther Herlitz, who will be awarded the Israel Prize for Lifetime Achievement, still writes a newspaper column, gives lectures and is active in several organizations.
By YAAKOV BAR-ONHerlitz (second from right) in Egypt during her service in the British Army during World War II(photo credit: REPRODUCTION: RAANAN COHEN)
Dozens of bouquets of flowers surround former MK Esther Herlitz, who was Israel’s first female ambassador in the Foreign Service, in her well-kept apartment in a retirement residence in Tel Aviv. Suddenly, at 93 years old, she was informed that she would be receiving the Israel Prize for Lifetime Achievement together with actor Chaim Topol.“Who will be the education minister who presents the award?” she asks.The prime minister will be filling in for him.“When I was head of the international harp competition, I organized a fund-raising event at my home in New York. I invited [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, who was the Israeli ambassador to the UN. That is when I knew he was a good speaker. The question is what he talks about. At the UN he was fine, but [David] Ben-Gurion was a great prime minister who knew how to take control of the country,” she says.That’s just how Herlitz is. At her age, she is limited in her movement and her hearing is impaired, but her words are as sharp as a razor, and her humor is equally honed, the way it was in the past. She quickly draws the first arrow from her quiver.“As a former ambassador, I know that the first thing you learn in the Foreign Affairs Ministry, loud and clear, is not to fight with the president of the United States – not like what is happening now,” she says, while she recalls the days after the 1956 Sinai Campaign.“When president [Dwight] Eisenhower wanted to sanction Israel, I was the Israeli consul-general in New York. I asked one of the important senators to go to his president and tell him that if he made that move, it would be a mistake.The senator did so, and the president was convinced and changed his mind about his action, and I was left on the sidelines. That’s how it works. A diplomat has to know how to work behind the scenes.”And today? “As foreign affairs minister, [Avigdor] Liberman is acting like a bull in a china shop. For 60 years we have had a good relationship with Turkey, the largest Muslim country in the Middle East – even with their story with the Armenians – and look at the trouble we are in. Instead of building bridges with the rest of the world, we are destroying the ones we have,” she says.Some 34 years have passed since Herlitz left the Knesset, but she is just as strong in the business as before.“I thought our people were smarter than they are, that they wouldn’t run to vote for Bibi after all the publicity that blackened him. But even if I don’t agree with something, I’m at an age that I can’t start a riot,” she says.Did she hope that Isaac Herzog would win the election? “Yes, I hoped, and what came out of it? Apparently he couldn’t win, anyway.The leadership crisis is a worldwide problem in our fast digital world. Today not only do we not have Ben-Gurion, but we don’t have [Levi] Eshkol, Golda [Meir] or [Pinhas] Sapir, either. We have Bibi, and he doesn’t pay attention to the Jewish people – only the rich ones who give him money. Clearly, the European Jews are in trouble, but who is supposed to take care of this problem? [Natan] Sharansky? After all, he is a refugee himself,” she says.HERLITZ WAS personally familiar with the roots of the problem in Europe. She was born in Berlin in the autumn of 1921, the daughter of historian George Herlitz, who established the Central Zionist Archives.“As a child, I knew there was no future for the Jews in Europe. In 1933, when the Nazis rose to power in Germany, we moved to Israel. That was when the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem was ready to absorb the Zionist Archives that my father brought with him,” she says.Herlitz’s first steps in Israel were not lined with roses.“At the Rehavia Gymnasia, we were three yekke girls, and we spoke German with one another,” she recalls.“Shut up, Nazi!” – that’s what a student in her class, Shmuel Katznelson, later called Tamir, would say to them.“Other students bothered us as well,” she says. “We were afraid to go back to school until my father and the principal made a fuss in the classroom. When Arne De Shalit [later chair of the Diaspora Board of Directors], who died last week, invited me to her birthday party, that was the sign that I was being welcomed into Israeli society.”The three girls went to the high school that opened in Jerusalem’s Beit Hakerem neighborhood, where one of their classmates was Yitzhak Navon.“There we felt we benefited from the lawlessness when professors from the university, who did not have another job, such as Ernst Simon and Michael Ben-Ari, came to teach us,” she says.“‘Your head is not in school,’ my father said to me. Then, during the events, we were active in the Hagana. ‘Instead of concentrating on your studies, you’re hiding weapons.’” In 1942, during World War II, Herlitz, then a young teacher who had just graduated from the seminary, decided to enlist in the military. She joined the auxiliary corps of the British Army.“Even if we all understood English, we insisted that the orders also be given in Hebrew by us, the sergeants, throughout the training,” Herlitz recounts. “Yes, speaking Hebrew as a principle.”She is the only Jewish officer in the British Army from Israel who is still alive.One of the roles she fulfilled was commanding the drivers of officers’ vehicles in Cairo.“I did not understand how it was allowed there, but even an officer in the women’s corps had a soldier as a driver,” she says, conveying a feminist twist.“Serving in the British Army contributed personally to each of us,” says former lieutenant-colonel Herlitz. “Nationally, I have no doubt that enlisting in the British Army from the Jewish community helped build the IDF. In the War of Independence, I was the deputy commander of the women’s corps in Jerusalem. For some reason, I did not officially obtain the rank of lieutenant.Years later, chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon gave me the rank during the broadcast of Sherutrom, a program that raised money for the army,” she recounts.DESPITE ALL this, Herlitz did not choose to continue in a military career.When she left the armed forces in 1946, she enrolled in the first class of the Jewish Agency’s school for diplomats.“What we learned was later discovered to be irrelevant in the Foreign Service,” she says.That is when she understood that diplomacy and motherhood are incompatible.“I was suitable for that profession because I didn’t have a family,” remarks Herlitz, who never married.In the War of Independence, she served in Jerusalem until they remembered that she was trained to be a diplomat.So she was sent to open the Foreign Ministry offices in the military headquarters in Tel Aviv. On the “Burma Road,” her first stop was to visit her aunt in Tel Aviv. She immediately wanted two things that she was missing in the besieged capital: a shower and a tomato.At 27, Herlitz was appointed director of the United States division, “a country I had never visited before,” she says.After that, she skipped straight to the Israeli delegation to the UN and continued as first secretary at the embassy in Washington and consul-general in New York. In 1962 she was appointed head of the Foreign Ministry’s guests.“Foreign minister Golda Meir conquered Africa, and esteemed dignitaries came from there one by one,” she says.“But I especially remember the health minister of Ghana. They woke me up in the middle of the night and told me that the chief needed a woman. ‘How should I know? Send him to the hotel keeper – he will find him an arrangement,’ I said. I think he found one,” she says.Herlitz, a woman who continuously shattered the glass ceiling, made it big in 1966 when she was appointed Israel’s ambassador to Denmark. “I felt at home in Copenhagen. There was a tradition of embassies there,” says Herlitz.“I especially made friends with people who were leaders of the underground revolution during the Holocaust. As Israel’s ambassador, it was important for me to maintain a kosher home there,” she adds.As she was Israel’s first female ambassador, the Foreign Ministry had no protocol regarding what to wear when submitting her credentials to the king, so they made a special order from Paris.“In those days, there was lack of knowledge about fashion,” she explains.“At a dinner party held by foreign minister Moshe Sharett for his office workers at the Sharon hotel, the men received tuxedos as gifts. What about me? I got an embroidered Yemenite shirt and a long black silk skirt.Years later, when I went to Germany with a delegation of MKs, we were going to the opera. Suddenly I saw that the wives of the MKs were wearing gowns, and I was in a suit. ‘What is this?’ I asked the secretary of the Knesset. He said, ‘I forgot that we have a female MK,’” she recounts.IN 1974, the days after the Yom Kippur War, Herlitz was already deep in politics, elected to the eighth Knesset on the Labor list. This was an opportunity for her to take over yet another male bastion as the first female member of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. Out of the sea of memories, she talks about one: “Once we drove to Sinai when the area was still ours. The Knesset car got stuck in the desert. We waited for rescue.What do you do? You talk. The male members of the committee did not let me say a word. Then the head of the committee, Yitzhak Navon, a friend of mine from high school, took command and said to them, ‘Guys, Esther has something to say. Listen to her.’ Only then did they remember that I existed,” she says.“I love music,” says Herlitz, who has had a subscription to the Philharmonic since she was young. “They call me a dinosaur in the orchestra. From the first season, I remember the conductor Arturo Toscanini. It’s incredible how this short, thin man stepped onto the podium and looked like a king. Like him, I remember Leonard Bernstein, who would call me ‘Mein ambassador’ [my ambassador].”Apart from going to concerts, Herlitz is a busy woman.“I go to funerals and write obituaries,” she says.Herlitz also writes a newspaper column, gives lectures about countries she has visited and is active in several organizations, such as Tzevet, an army veterans’ organization.“Oh, how square those officers are!” she comments. “Apparently, lengthy service in the army broke them.”SHE KEEPS close track of what is happening.“I hope the Labor Party will not join the government,” Herlitz says, “but I’m afraid that in the end it will. It’s time to end Netanyahu’s policy of not talking with the Palestinians and not trying to make peace with them because of the assumption that there is no hope. You cannot run a country if there is no hope. That is what Ben-Gurion taught us. It is unfortunate to hear that there are people who do not believe that there can be a Jewish state that is at peace with the Palestinians. “ Why is she afraid? “Because those who represent the party in the Knesset today are go-getters and can’t stand being in the opposition. Mentally, they are not prepared for it. They don’t understand the importance of the opposition in a parliamentary democracy.Today there are no oppositionists like [Menachem] Begin. I used to sit next to him on the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, before he became prime minister.It was a pleasure to hear him speak, even if I didn’t agree with him. But Begin belongs in the past, as well as Ben-Gurion.Today there is no vision. And without a vision, it is impossible to lead a country,“ she says.Herlitz, the founder of the Center for Volunteer Services, greatly appreciates her Israel Prize partner, Chaim Topol, for his work on establishing a rehabilitation center for sick children in the Galilee. But the famed entertainer has not yet called to congratulate her.“He’s busy,” she is convinced. “The women’s organizations have not called, either, and not even the Foreign Ministry.Maybe it’s because they closed up shop for the holiday,” she reasons.Translated by Maya Pelleg.
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