Paula Ben-Gurion

Marriage to David Ben-Gurion

On 5 December 1917, Munweis and Ben-Gurion married each other in a civil ceremony at the New York City Hall. This surprised Ben-Gurion's fellow activists, who did not even know he and Munweis were in a relationship. They refused to seek sanctification for their marriage from a rabbi, despite repeated pleas by religious officials throughout their life together. Understanding that they did not share each others' views on Zionism, Ben-Gurion had warned her that, if they married, she would have to move with him to Palestine, which at the time was a poor country without modern public utilities. He also told her that he planned to enlist in the nascent Jewish Legion and fight in the Palestine campaign against the Ottoman Empire. She decided to marry him anyway, hoping she would be able to dissuade him from going to Palestine and signing up to the Legion. Munweis took her husband's surname, Ben-Gurion. She also began using Paula as her first name, going by what her husband called her. Before long, she had given up her career as a nurse to commit to married life. She left the Beth Israel hospital, two months before she was due to graduate with her diploma, despite pleas from her friends. According to Israeli historian Anita Shapira, "she made him her life's work". Shapira wrote that Paula was not an intellectual or emotional partner for Ben-Gurion, and instead dedicated herself to caring for him. She introduced him to personal hygiene practices such as regularly bathing, brushing his teeth and even changing his underwear, which he had previously been unaccustomed to.

In April 1918, after only five months of marriage, Ben-Gurion informed Paula that he had enlisted in the Legion and was about to be deployed to Palestine. Paula, having just found out that she was pregnant, broke down in tears; she would have to give birth and raise their child alone. She tried to convince him not to leave, but he responded that he believed his cause was "greater and more sacred than anything in the world", including her. Left alone while waiting for their first child, she became severely depressed. In his letters to her from the front, he took responsibility for having left her and reaffirmed his love for her, but continued to justify his actions, believing that his Zionist ideals would eventually bring them "divine happiness" and "uninhibited love". He wrote to her that, if he had not enlisted, then he believed he would have been "unworthy of you bearing my child". On 11 September 1918, Paula gave birth to their daughter; following her husband's wishes, she named her Geula (the Hebrew word for "Redemption"). She wrote that their baby was pretty, despite resembling her father.

A year after the war ended, Paula finally reunited with her husband in Palestine. She had agreed to emigrate purely out of obligation to her husband. She insisted on travelling first class, and after a six-week journey, she and her daughter arrived in November 1919. The family then travelled to London, where Paula gave birth to a son; they named him Amos, after the Jewish prophet. They then moved to the Polish city of Płońsk, where they stayed with Ben-Gurion's family for over a year while Ben-Gurion himself travelled around for conferences. Paula had a tense relationship with her in-laws, frequently criticising their poor hygiene. She also struggled with the poor standard of living in the city, having to boil the contaminated municipal water. In 1925, she gave birth to their third child, another daughter, who they named Renana. Paula refused to bear him a fourth child, despite his desire for another. By then, their relationship had deteriorated; Ben-Gurion spent much of his time away from home and communicated with Paula in an increasingly formal manner, expressing less affection towards her. Many of his letters to her were not intended to be kept private, and some were specifically intended for people other than her to read. According to British historian Elizabeth Monroe, "Paula [was] a mere shadow" in Ben-Gurion's correspondence during this period.

In the early 1930s, the family moved into a newly-built house in Tel Aviv. They all stayed in a single room, while Paula rented the other rooms out to families on holiday in the city. In May 1935, Paula discovered that, over the previous four years, her husband had been having an affair with a woman named Rega Klapholz during his trips to Europe; she forced him to end the relationship after Klapholz arrived in Palestine. In August 1935, Paula was delegated to the Nineteenth Zionist Congress in Lucerne; she set sail along with Rachel Yanait Ben-Zvi, Dov Hoz, Abba Hushi, Berl Katznelson, Golda Meir and David Remez, with whom she spearheaded an initiative to establish a shipping company under the Jewish Agency. Following the congress, Paula and her husband settled in rural Switzerland. Her husband attempted to reconcile with her, but she did not enjoy the location as much as him and did not join him on his walks through the mountains. In August 1937, Paula attended the Twentieth Zionist Congress in Basel, where she clashed with Chaim Weizmann over his disrespect towards her husband. By the late 1930s, Paula shared her husband's interests in their correspondence with each other.

Following the outbreak of World War II and the Battle of France in 1940, Paula's husband wrote to her of his hope in the governments of Britain and the United States to win the war against Nazi Germany. He frequently praised British prime minister Winston Churchill in his letters to her during this period. During the war, Paula's son Amos was wounded while serving in the Jewish Brigade and was hospitalised in Liverpool, where he fell in love with a Manx nurse. Paula objected to her son marrying a gentile and attempted to pressure him not to go through with it, but the wedding went ahead despite her protests in 1946. Paula was incensed when her husband welcomed their new daughter-in-law into the family and helped her emigrate to Palestine.

Spouse of the prime minister

On 14 May 1948, Paula witnessed her husband declaiming the Declaration of Israeli Independence at the Tel Aviv Museum, which resulted in the establishment of the State of Israel. David Ben-Gurion became the first prime minister of Israel, with Paula serving as the spouse of the prime minister from 1948 to 1953. From this point onward, she and her husband sent each other less correspondence; Elizabeth Monroe supposed that they were likely spending more of their time together. In an interview with Mira Avrech, published in Yedioth Ahronoth, Paula spoke at length about her husband's personal and political life, giving anecdotes of his daily routine and habits, as well as the lead-up to the Declaration of Independence. As spouse of the prime minister during her husband's first term, her outfits were designed by her friend Lola Beer Ebner, who also designed outfits for First Lady Vera Weizmann and other women in Israeli high society. Paula's presence at fashion shows, at a time of economic crisis when basic necessities were being rationed, drew criticism from journalists and the wider public.

She continued taking care of her husband by ensuring he ate, slept and dressed well. She frequently turned away people visiting her husband, including people she thought might exhaust him and those who she did not like. In biographies about her husband, Paula has frequently been depicted as an "angry gatekeeper" who "bark[ed]" at visitors, and contrasted with descriptions of her husband's warmth. She once interrupted a meeting to bring her husband a drink. When Isaiah Berlin met the Ben-Gurions in Tel Aviv in 1950, he recalled Paula rejecting her husband's offer to serve their guest a coffee or an orange juice, saying "water would be much easier"; Berlin accepted the water. She would openly confront her husband whenever she thought he was wrong about something. At a speech her husband gave at Lod Airport, when he complained that many young Jews did not go on aliyah and only donated their money, Paula interjected "that's important too, isn't it?"

On 7 December 1953, Ben-Gurion resigned as prime minister, and the following week, he and Paula moved to Sde Boker, a kibbutz in the Negev desert. He had not considered her wishes when he made the decision for them to settle in the desert. She was forced to leave behind a full life in Tel Aviv, and was not happy with the move to a kibbutz in the desert, where she would live an ascetic lifestyle alongside people who were much younger than herself. She nevertheless oversaw the design of their new cottage, which would have a large study and separate bedrooms, and enforced strict standards of hygiene in her home as well as in the collective kitchen. She did not like the taste of the food served by the kibbutz kitchen and insisted that her husband eat her own "kutch-mutch" – a bland but healthy meal – twice a day.

In 1955, Ben-Gurion returned to his post as prime minister. He moved to Jerusalem, where he held a Bible studies class every Saturday afternoon; Paula found the classes "terribly bor[ing]" and thought her husband only held them out of obligation to learn about Jewish history. During the Suez Crisis of 1956, when her husband was sick, she almost refused entry to Yaakov Herzog, but was convinced that the matter was urgent and allowed him into their room. From then on, Herzog was one of only a few people who Paula would allow to visit her husband; he would tap on her bedroom window whenever he needed her to let him in. In 1963, she and her husband attended the funeral of Shlomo Lavi, the founder of the kibbutz movement. That same year, her husband resigned again as prime minister and retired to Sde Boker. At meetings of the Sde Boker bible study group, Paula would usually be the one to call an end to each session, in order to ensure her husband got enough rest. Whenever she left the kibbutz to visit Tel Aviv, her husband sent her frequent telegrams telling her he missed her and asking for her to come back. During this time, Paula became an admirer of the right-wing politician Menachem Begin, and over the course of the 1960s, she was happy to see her husband's personal relationship with Begin improve. Paula was one of only a few women whose image appeared on the frontpage of Israeli newspapers during the Six-Day War.

Death and legacy

Paula Ben-Gurion died in the Beer Sheba Hospital on 29 January 1968, at 76 years old. At her deathbed, her husband read the verse "thou wentest after me in the wilderness, in a land that was not sown" (Jeremiah 2:2). He subsequently retired from politics and public life. David Ben-Gurion had never discussed with Paula where she would have liked her body to be buried. He decided that her body would be buried on a cliff next to the Midreshet Sde Boker, in a small plot surrounded by trees, which he had intended for his own body. She received a simple funeral at Sde Boker, where it was attended by family and members of the Israeli government, and conducted by the chief military rabbi Shlomo Goren. She was given a eulogy by Devora Netzer, who described Paula as the prime minister's "helpmate". The site of her burial was renovated extensively, building a ceremonial plaza over her own grave and moving her gravestone away from her actual resting place.

Paula's husband was left feeling lonely after her death and fell into a deep depression. He lived alone in their house and continued eating her "kutch-mutch" to honour her memory. He also spoke very little to other people in the kibbutz, keeping mostly to his small circle of bodyguards and his secretary. He wrote that, after Paula's death, his only remaining close friends were Shlomo Zemach and Rachel Beit-Halakhmi. David Ben-Gurion died on 3 December 1973, in Paula's former bedroom in their home in Tel Aviv. His body was buried alongside Paula's. Per a request in his will, no eulogies were given to him at the couple's gravesite. In contrast to Paula's funeral, a modest event where mourning and emotions had been freely expressed, his own funeral was carried out as an unemotional state affair. Their burial place has since become a secular pilgrimage site.

The Ben-Gurion home in Tel Aviv was turned into a museum, in which David Ben-Gurion was centred as the protagonist of the exhibition, while Paula was relegated to a secondary role. Her own bedroom was covered in photographs of her husband. Architect Arieh Sharon designed a dining hall for a kibbutz in the Negev desert, which he named after Paula, but it was never constructed. A school in Jerusalem, named after Paula Ben-Gurion, was established to provide education to both secular and orthodox Jewish students; its attempt at integration quickly collapsed, with orthodox parents insisting their children be segregated from the secular students. On the 50th anniversary of Paula's death, in January 2018, a conference was held at the Ben-Gurion museum to commemorate her; all the presentations were given by men, and they were followed by a general discussion about the spouses of famous men. During the April 2019 Israeli legislative election, Sara Netanyahu complained that the Israeli press "gave more credit to Paula Ben Gurion than to her".