Page 113 - ISRAEL'S CRADLE

The Jewish National Council was subjected several times to boycotts by some groups in the Yishuv. There were lengthy periods in which the right-wing groups, the farmers, the Revisionists and the Sephardim refused to participate in it. Relations with the Jewish Agency also saw ups and downs. After World War II, the two bodies agreed on the establishment of joint committees for handling immediate matters, such as absorbing Aliya and assisting soldiers discharged from the British Army. The feeling among the heads of the Jewish National Council was that the Jewish Agency was looking for ways to reduce its activities and influence.
The Jewish National Council's finest hour was in the critical months of the War of Independence on the eve of the establishment of the state. While the heads of the Jewish Agency, David Ben-Gurion (Security), Moshe Shertok (Foreign Affairs) and Eliezer Kaplan (Finances) and Eliyahu Dobkin (Aliya) contended with particularly weighty matters in Israel and abroad, that were related to the war and establishing the state, the Jewish National Council was involved in establishing the governing institutions of the new state. In coordination with the Jewish Agency, it proposed that the members of the two executives – 16 from the Jewish National Council and 12 from the Jewish Agency – would become the supreme governing body of the nascent state. This proposal was adopted with changes and these people, alongside representatives of entities, which had not been included until then in the governing institutions of the Yishuv – Agudat Yisrael. The Communists, The Sephardim and the Yemenites – were added to what was called the "People's Council," which had 37 members. An executive governing body was elected from it, "Minhelet HaAm." On the day the state was established, these two bodies changed their names to the Provisional State Council and the Provisional Government
The Jewish National Council's duties ostensibly ended on the day the state was established. Its leaders and employees were included within the institutions of the new state and its powers were transferred to the various government ministries. But the process was not simple, and nine months were required for its completion. Difficulties arose primarily on the issue of education, since the Provisional Government had no Ministry of Education, and it was only established when the first permanent government was founded in early 1949.
The Assembly of Representatives and the Jewish National Council were permanently disbanded in 1949. The presence of the Council in the National Institutions Building had come then to an end. The activities and achievements of the Jewish National Council are not well known today. Nor has the written history been kind to it. When the publication of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica ended in the Seventies, it turned out that the Jewish National Council was mentioned quite a few times in the Encyclopedia but was not given its own entry.
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