2.2 KiB
| category | tags | summary | born | died | location | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Business & Finance |
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Abraham Feinberg was a wealthy New York businessman and ardent advocate of statehood for Israel. | 1908 | 1998 | New York City, New York |
Abraham Feinberg was a wealthy New York businessman and ardent advocate of statehood for Israel. By 1947, he played a major and discreet role in fundraising and White House lobbying for Israel and the Democratic Party. He would operate at the highest levels between Washington, D.C. and Jerusalem for two decades.1
Feinberg was a close friend of Ernst David Bergmann, and in the fall of 1947, Bergmann indiscreetly revealed to Feinberg that there was uranium in the Negev Desert desert, implying a path for Israel to develop the atomic bomb. Feinberg was astonished by this talk and "shushed him up."1
Feinberg was recruited by David Ben-Gurion in 1945 to help raise money for guerrilla operations against the British mandatory power in Palestine. He recalled that the kibbutz's administrative building, constructed near a large British military base, was a "fraud," serving as a cover for a secret underground plant producing bullets for the Hagannah. The facility was "scooped out" in twenty-seven days, with workers alternating between farming and arms production to maintain the deception.2
Truman Library oral history
Feinberg gave an oral history interview to the Harry S. Truman Library, conducted by Richard D. McKinzie on August 23, 1973. He was a business executive and philanthropist active in the cause of immigration to Palestine and in the creation of the State of Israel, 1945 to 1948, and a friend of President Harry S. Truman.3
Footnotes
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Hersh, Seymour M. The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. Random House, 1991. Chapter 2. ↩︎
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Hersh, Seymour M. The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. Random House, 1991. Chapter 15. ↩︎
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Harry S. Truman Library, "Abraham Feinberg Oral History Interview," interview of August 23, 1973 by Richard D. McKinzie, biographical note. https://trumanlibrary.gov/oralhist/feinberg.htm ↩︎