Esther Estee Hirschfeld

From Mrs. Dalia Dorner farewell to the Supreme Court - 3.3.2004;
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On this farewell day, I remember the beginning of my path in Israel. I thank my educators at the Neve Kid Children's Institute in Nahariya, where I grew up - to the director of Ms. Hirsch, who re-established an institution for Jewish children she ran in Germany, and to her daughter, my mentor, Estee Hirschfeld, who honored me today with her presence.

Fifty children, ages 11-6, were without family and no common language. We came to Neve Kid from different countries, most often from Europe. Among us were children taken out of monasteries and non-Jewish families' homes, where they found refuge in their countries of origin. The children of Nahariya called us: the children of the institution, "the poor children" since the few means that the youth immigration in those years could allocate to our possession were evident in the attire we wore. Even the food we were given was little. But the education we received was the best. We learned about the heritage of Israel and Zionism. Indeed, each of us experiences the desperate need of the Jewish people for a country. We witnessed the arrival of the illegal immigration ship "Hannah Szenes" on the shores of Nahariya, and the illegal immigrants slept with us in our beds before being smuggled and dispersed among the settlement. We were also sent two children of Neve Kid - and in this respect we won new clothes - to convince an Anglo-American committee, which was to recommend the extent of Jewish immigration, to allow Holocaust survivors waiting in camps in Germany to immigrate to Israel.

But even in those harsh days of the Holocaust and after the Holocaust, when the Jewish people came together, our “Yeeke” mentors educated us to universal values, even deep in our heritage: human love, respect for man as a person, and the Kantian principle that man is never a means to attain purpose. But the world is a purpose to itself.

This luggage I carried with me wherever I went. I came to this court with it. . . .