David Ben-Gurion became the first Israeli prime minister to visit Canada, in May 1961. But he had been in Canada once before—as a member of the British Army’s Jewish battalion in 1918, he trained at Fort Edward in Windsor, N.S.
This time around, John Diefenbaker hailed his Israeli counterpart as a “gallant and great leader of the forces of democracy.”
Ben-Gurion spoke to Canadian Jewish leadership at Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel, who received this invitation from Samuel Bronfman (Montreal), Lawrence Freiman (Ottawa) and D. Lou Harris (Toronto), on behalf of the Canadian Jewish Congress, the United Zionist Council of Canada, and State of Israel Bonds, respectively.
A return visit to Canada in March 1967 was at the invitation of Beth Tzedec Rabbi Stuart Rosenberg. The now former prime minister agreed to come on the condition that he speak primarily to schoolchildren—and primarily in Hebrew—and 400 students met him at the airport.
All of Toronto’s day school pupils were invited. Ben-Gurion told the 4,000 who attended, “There can be no Israel without the children of Israel. Learn Hebrew, visit Israel, go there to live, and help make the Negev fertile.”
