Growing up in the United States, every pupil is taught stories about the Founding Fathers from an early age, about the 56 men who attached their names - and thereby their destinies - to the Declaration of Independence.
Those heroes, among them Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Hancock, and Benjamin Franklin, come to seem larger than life to many American schoolchildren, as they learn about how the 13 colonies threw off the yoke of the British Empire.
It is not surprising then, that when Golda Meyerson - later Meir - waited to step up to the podium to add her name to Israel's Declaration of Independence, her thoughts went back to the legends she learned as a child in Milwaukee, as she writes in her memoirs:
"From my childhood in America, I learned about the Declaration of Independence and the geniuses who signed it. I couldn't imagine these were real people doing something real. And here I am signing it, actually signing a Declaration of Independence. I didn't think it was due me, that I, Goldie Mabovich Meyerson, deserved it, that I had lived to see the day. My hands shook. We had done it. We had brought the Jewish people into existence.
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