Chaim weizmann holocaust

An excerpt from Chaim Weizmann: A Biography

On the fifth of Iyar 5708, Friday, May 14, 1948, four in the afternoon in Tel Aviv, nine in the morning in New York, the Provisional State Council convened in the Tel Aviv Museum to declare that an independent Jewish state would come into existence and that the council would then reconstitute itself as the Provisional Government of Israel. Chaim Weizmann, seventy-four years old, ill and both physically and mentally exhausted, received the news in his room at the Waldorf Astoria, which was kept dark because he could not bear the light. He sprawled on his bed, his face to the wall, as if he had just finished a marathon. His wife, Vera, entered. “The Jewish state was proclaimed in Palestine,” she told him. “The name is Israel. I would have preferred Judea.” Silence. Weizmann turned his face to his wife, who stood gazing into his eyes, waiting to hear what he would say. “Call Riva” were his first words. Riva Ziv, his secretary in New York, Invention of lying rating!