I had intended to write this eek about Hanukkah, and even read the two Books of the Maccabees, a feat easier said than done, as they are not part of the Hebrew Bible. But on Wednesday I read in Haaretz that a document from a much more recent past had come to light, and it commanded my undivided attention.

Apparently in 1958, while Jews from Poland were emigrating en masse to Israel as part of what was called "the Gomulka aliyah," from 1957 on (Wladyslaw Gomulka, the first secretary of the Polish Communist Party, gave permission for and even encouraged Polish Jews to emigrate) - then-foreign minister Golda Meir wrote the Israeli ambassador in Warsaw, Katriel Katz, a "top secret" letter, saying: "A proposal was raised in the coordination committee to inform the Polish government that we want to institute selection in aliyah, because we cannot continue accepting sick and handicapped people. Please give your opinion as to whether this can be explained to the Poles without hurting immigration."

I myself arrived in Israel at the age of 7, with my parents (47, 46) and sister (9), on board the "Aliyah" passenger ship, as part of the Gomulka wave of immigration. I even remembered attending a reception at the Israeli embassy, on Filtrowa Street in Warsaw, not far from our house on Nowowiejska Street.

This week, I let out a retroactive sigh of relief, realizing that the very fact that we are here is proof that the Israelis apparently did not deem us to be sick or handicapped, way back when.

But then I checked the dates: Meir's letter was written in April 1958, and we arrived in Haifa in September 1957. I remember that both my sister and I contracted the measles (she thinks it was strep) a few weeks earlier in Genoa, while awaiting our departure, and that we had to wait two weeks until we were declared fit (to travel, I assumed then). So that was what prompted Golda's letter? Wow, I had no idea.

While en route to the Promised Land, and especially while convalescing in Genoa, I read Sholem Aleichem's "Adventures of Mottel, the Cantor's Son" in Polish - maybe to put me in the mood for relocating to the Jewish state. I expressly remember Mottel worrying that his and his family's health would be checked and found unsatisfactory upon arrival at Ellis Island, and that they would be sent back. I felt lucky that I was going to be spared such a fate in Israel. Little did I know, it turns out.

Over the years Israeli politicians and officials have expressed concern that certain Jewish "human material" due to arrive here - mostly (but not exclusively) from Arab countries - would be of questionable "quality." Some of these speakers were rather blunt, and I sympathized with the spokesmen of the Jewish immigrants from Arab countries who protested the discrimination they suffered after arriving here. I didn't know that we Poles were patronized and suspected of being unworthy, too. Oh, well.

Let's see if I have this right now: Israel, established as the national home for the Jewish people after a horrific world war, and as a safe haven for persecuted Jews from all over the world, was considering a "selection" process (now, where did I encounter that word before?) because it preferred not to offer asylum to those who evidently needed it more than others: those who were not only Jewish, but sick and handicapped as well.

Such a preference contrasts sharply, for example, with the words inscribed in 1903 on the Statue of Liberty, from Emma Lazarus' poem "The New Colossus": "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" Golda Meir probably wasn't aware that what she was actually saying then to the Poles was: "Don't give me my tired, my poor, my huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

In a truly typical example of Polish behavior (true, Meir had Russian roots, was raised in the United States and lived in Israel, but being Polish is a state of mind; even if you scratch a Moroccan, you'll find a Pole underneath), she ended her letter, wondering whether the proposal could "be explained to the Poles without hurting immigration."

Translated into plainer language, she was saying: We know what we are doing would be called in Yiddish "Es past nisht" - which means "It's not done" - but we don't want others to think so, too, or to speak ill of us, as those anti-Semites are wont to do.

Yes, we were a young country then, fighting for our very existence against all odds and coping with waves of immigration, which were threatening to sink the fragile ship of the newborn state with its inexperienced crew, and we needed young, healthy and able-bodied Jews. So maybe Meir's idea was kosher. But it stinks. On second thought, it's definitely not kosher, even in retrospect.

Whether he has undergone "selection" or is spared that ordeal, every immigrant who starts his life over from scratch in a new country and in a new language leaves part of his life and of himself behind. There are those who manage, and those who do not. One can be a invalid because of war or can become disabled due to accident or illness. But there are many people - more than we like to think - who were crippled or are disabled or handicapped or infirm due to immigration. And my Polish-Jewish mother, may she rest in peace, was one of those.

And when I think what she would have said had she read Meir's letter ...