LETTER: TLS to Bernard Baruch.
Keller Plans Her Tour Of Israel
Keller, Helen. Typed letter signed, “Helen Keller,” to “Mr. [Bernard] Baruch,” March 14, 1950.
Two leaves of Arcan Ridge, Westport, Conn. letterhead. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
Keller thanks Baruch for his contribution towards her hoped-for diplomatic mission to Israel, and shares personal views on the intended journey. Signed by Keller in her labored block print, it reads in full:
I hope it was a pleasant, restful sojourn you passed in the South, and that you have returned to your many labors greatly refreshed.
As yet I have heard nothing about my proposed visit to Palestine. Mrs. Weil, who was to raise seventy thousand dollars, as I wrote you, for me to present to the blind out there, has been very ill in hospital a long time, and is at present not equal to the task of carrying her plan into effect. You can imagine how chagrined I am that such a precious dream of serving hard-pressed multitudes of my handicapped fellows must be postponed. But I trust that when Miss Thomson and I return from our holiday in Europe, something may be started which will fulfill my desire. I will keep the check you sent in such generous confidence a while longer and return it to you if destiny does not permit me to go out to Palestine after all.
Wishing you many great satisfactions in your historic and constructive beneficence to mankind, and with cordial greetings in which Miss Thomson joins, I am, Sincerely yours, [signed] Helen Keller [typed] Westport, Conn., March fourteenth, 1950.
Baruch was one of several patrons who helped to fund Keller’s trip to Israel, which was finally undertaken in the spring of 1952. She had written to her friend and benefactor Jo Davidson (the sculptor) in 1951, “My travels through the world would indeed be incomplete unless I breathed the air of that land tiny in bulk but spiritually mighty” (quoted by Joseph P. Lash in Helen and Teacher, NY: 1980, p. 728). With Davidson’s help, donors like Baruch were located, the State Department was contacted, and the trip expanded to include Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. On May 19 she entered Jerusalem, where Keller delivered the first of her speeches in Hebrew: “Dear Friends: It is marvelous to be among you in this young Commonwealth because you have faith which is the sight of the soul” (ibid., p. 729). Highlights of the two-week trip included visits with Golda Meir, and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, and the Israeli parliament whose speaker, Josef Spinzrak, called her in his welcoming address “the very symbol of faith and the victory of noble human will,” adding, “your coming is a blessed and encouraging sign to us in our life and in the faith we are treading” (ibid., p. 730).
Keller had an acute impact on how the blind were viewed by Israeli society: when she heard that they had established, with pride, a “Village for the Blind” to which any family including a blind member was consigned, Lash relates, “she exploded”: “The blind must not be segregated,” she insisted. “They should be trained for membership of normal society and not as a society of handicapped persons. You must break up that village.” The Israelis did so. Its name was changed to Kfar Uriel, the Light of God.”
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