It is an honor and a privilege to be a “first” to do/be anything. While hard work and dedication usually go along with the title, it is hard to fathom being bestowed with such a declaration. Our next spotlight in our 100 Greatest Women On Coins blog series honors a “first” that helped a country establish itself and gain independence. With help from author Ron Guth, we will continue our journey through the Whitman Publishing compilation discovering just how special this next woman is.
#65 - Golda Meir
Born in Kiev, Russia, as Golda Mabovitch in May of 1898, she moved with her family to the states in 1905. Her family ran a grocery store in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. When she got to high school, Golda would become an active member of the Zionist movement. After high school, she married Morris Meyerson and the couple moved to a kibbutz (intentional community based on agriculture) in Palestine.
There she was active in politics and was the emissary to the United States between 1932 and 1934. She raised large sums of money to help with the establishment of Israel and even earned the first Israeli passport. Serving as a minister of Labor and a foregin minister, she was a member of the Knesset between 1949 and 1974 which was the national legislature of Israel. In 1956, she would change her last name to “Meir” (which means to illuminate in Hebrew) from Meyerson. She would eventually become the prime minister in 1969, making her the first female to do so in the country. As prime minister, she would help lead Israel during the unfortunate massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in addition to the 1973 Yom Kippur War. After the war and after her party would win the elections in December of 1973, Golda resigned as prime minister and left politics for good. She later died in 1978 of lymphatic cancer.
Israel would issue a bimetallic 10 new sheqalim coin in 1995 with the image of Golda. She appeared as a silhouette amid vertical and parallel lines on the design. There was also a 50-euro medallic coin in 1996 that was also issued in Israel. It features Golda’s image with a map of the world in the background with an airliner in flight and a menorah also depicted. A number of medals, stamps, and banknotes also feature her image.
According to Guth, collecting difficulty of these items is easy.