“As a Jew, there’s only one place in the world to live, and that’s Israel,” says Yitzhak Treister, a former New Zealander who has lived in Israel for over 40 years. “And for a non-Jew, I would say the only place in the world to live that’s worthwhile would be New Zealand.”
With all of his deep and enduring love for the Land of Israel, Treister, who made aliyah in 1983, works as an accountant, and recently became a certified tour guide, maintains that New Zealand is a special place.
“It’s a magnificent country, and it’s totally removed from any reality; it has its own reality. Their concerns are concerns of utopia. It’s [at] the end of the bloody world, and they don’t have to worry about much.”
Treister speaks rapturously of the Doubtful Sound, a fjord in New Zealand, and calls it “the closest thing to the World to Come in this world.”
Geographically, politically, and numerically, the two countries couldn’t be more different.
Israel is bordered by four largely unfriendly countries – Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt – with its nine million citizens living in an area of approximately 21,000 km.
New Zealand, by contrast, is more than 1,600 km. away from Australia, its nearest neighbor, and has a total land area of 268,000 sq. km. With all that space, its population is just 5.2 million. As of June 2024, there were more cows than people in the country.
Yet, says Treister, despite their vast differences, New Zealand played a pivotal role in the passage of the UN Partition Plan on November 29, 1947, which proposed the division of Mandatory Palestine into two independent states – one Arab and one Jewish.
New Zealand’s support for the plan, he explains, was largely due to the efforts of his great-uncle, Isaac Gotlieb, who was the first head of the New Zealand Zionist Federation.
Born in Latvia in 1891, Gotlieb moved to New Zealand in 1909 and owned a successful cabinet-making business. He was not only influential in the Jewish community but was well known in the community at large. “He was very passionate about Zionism and made himself known in the influential circles of New Zealand,” says Treister.
Peter Fraser, who was prime minister of New Zealand from 1940-1949, was one of the principal leaders of the smaller countries in the UN, whose votes were significant in the debate over partition. New Zealand, a colony of the United Kingdom from 1841 until 1907, was expected to follow the official British position and abstain in the partition vote.
However, Fraser was sympathetic to the Jewish position. In 1943, he spoke out forcefully against the Nazis, describing their rule as “one of the blackest chapters in the history of the human race.” Fraser expressed strong support for a Jewish state, saying that New Zealand intended to stand “four-square for justice for the ancient home,” adding that “The Jewish people naturally and rightly want to go back to Palestine.”
In addition, says Treister, Fraser and his fellow Labor Party members supported the Zionist position because of its socialist tendencies.
Fraser, though, still had some doubts as to the wisdom of the Partition Plan. He wanted the UN to succeed as a respected international body, but he said that without an international military presence, the plan would lead to war. He expressed his concerns to Carl Berendsen, New Zealand’s delegate to the United Nations, who tried to delay the vote until a better solution could be found that would enable forces to enforce the decision.
On November 22, 1947, Chaim Weizmann sent a telegram to Fraser, requesting that New Zealand cast its vote in favor of partition, stating that if it abstained, the plan might not pass.
On the night of November 28, Fraser, accompanied by colleagues and cabinet ministers, visited Gotlieb’s home to discuss the vote with him. Treister reports that years later, his cousins told him that they were sent upstairs so as not to disturb the important meeting between the prime minister and their father. Gotlieb, who was a passionate Zionist, convinced Fraser to vote in favor of partition.
On November 29, the representatives of the then-56 member countries of the UN gathered for the decisive vote. In order for the Partition Plan to be approved, a two-thirds majority was required from the countries that were casting votes (abstentions or absences were not counted).
The countries were called in alphabetical order. When New Zealand, the 34th country called, cast its vote in favor, it was the 19th vote in favor of establishing a Jewish state. Ultimately, by a vote of 33 to 13, with 10 abstentions, the member countries of the United Nations voted in favor of the Partition Plan, recommending the creation of two independent Arab and Jewish states.
The Partition Plan was accepted by the Jewish Agency for Palestine but was rejected by the Arab leaders and governments. The passage of the plan was greeted with jubilation among the Jews of Palestine, and it eventually led to the founding of the State of Israel the following May.
New Zealand has consistently supported Israel
Treister points out out that New Zealand’s assistance in passing the Partition Plan was not the only positive thing the country has done in the Holy Land. Some 30 years earlier, on October 31, 2017, the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade, part of the British Expeditionary Force, played a key role in the capture of Beersheba from the Ottoman Turks, attacking and capturing Tel el Saba, a fortified hill northeast of the city.
The next month, in another key battle, New Zealand’s forces fought 1,500 Turks near the village of Ayun Kara, near the site of present-day Ness Ziona.
The assistance provided by Treister’s great-uncle in persuading Fraser to vote for partition was invaluable. However, his family’s story took a tragic turn less than four years later.
Gotlieb and his wife, Rhina, who were celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary in 1950, decided to celebrate by taking a trip to Israel. During that trip, Gotlieb would serve as the official representative for the New Zealand Zionist Federation at the First World Zionist Convention following the establishment of the state, which was scheduled for February 1951.
Their daughter, Denise, accompanied them, along with Sam and Mary Treister, Gotlieb’s sister and brother-in-law, who were Yitzhak Treister’s grandparents. In July 1950, the group embarked on their trip, flying first to the US, where they visited relatives.
As a leading Zionist leader, Gotlieb spoke to local Zionist federations about New Zealand Jewry. The Detroit Jewish News, in its August 18, 1950 issue, reported that Gotlieb had been feted at a luncheon in his honor, calling him “the man from Down Under.” When they arrived in the US, they learned that the Zionist Convention in Israel had been postponed to July 1951.
After their US visit, they continued to England and France. On January 27, 1951, they boarded an Alitalia flight from Paris to Rome, from which they would take a connecting flight to Israel. The plane was struck by lightning and crashed. Rhina and Denise died instantly, as well as Sam and Mary Treister. Gotlieb survived the crash but died in the hospital a week later.
Yitzhak Treister’s father, Arnold, who recently celebrated his 100th birthday and lives in Auckland, was 25 at the time. He had to fly to Rome to identify the bodies of his parents, uncle, aunt, and cousin, and arrange their funerals. They were buried in Rome.
For Arnold and his siblings, the loss of their parents, aunt, uncle, and cousin was shattering. Treister adds that representatives of Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund in Rome helped get the news out and assisted the family.
Ultimately, it took nine months from their death until they were all buried in Rome, says Treister. He visited the graves of his relatives in Rome most recently in March.
The Isaac Gotlieb memorial
Several years ago, Treister discovered a memorial to his great-uncle that had been built in Kibbutz Gonen at the foot of the Golan Heights. The stone and plaque are part of a KKL-JNF forest planted in memory of Isaac Gotlieb, in cooperation with the Jewish community of New Zealand following his death.
He contacted Gotlieb’s relatives, one of whom sent him the KKL documents from the 1950s explaining about the site. Treister then visited the World Zionist Federation archives and got in touch with KKL-JNF.
With the assistance of a significant donation from JNF New Zealand, KKL-JNF is now expanding the Isaac Gotlieb memorial at Kibbutz Gonen. Treister says that plans are underway to conduct a ceremony with educators from northern Israel in August, during which the full story of Gotlieb’s role in the Partition Plan will be told.
KKL-JNF’s official ceremony is scheduled for February 2, 2026, which is Tu Bishvat and, perhaps coincidentally, is the English date of Gotlieb’s death.
While Treister’s family history played a role in his decision to make aliyah, his immediate inspiration to visit Israel came from his brother and sister, who had preceded him in visiting the country on Bnei Akiva’s post-high school hachshara (pre-immigration training) program.
“There was no way I was going to miss out on that,” says Treister. “It changed my life.”
He admits that for many years, he wasn’t clear about all the details of his great-uncle’s accomplishments. “I knew about the plane crash and had visited the graves in Rome, but I didn’t connect Isaac’s passion to mine, and I knew nothing about his history, other than that he was killed with his wife, daughter, and my grandparents on their way to visit Israel in 1951.
“I do vaguely remember that when I was waiting in line at passport control when I made aliyah, while chatting with a woman behind me she mentioned that she knew of the plane crash and those who were killed.”
Although his father spoke to his children about the crash, he had never mentioned the role that Isaac Gotlieb played in influencing New Zealand’s vote in favor of the Partition Plan. “Perhaps it was because of the horror he went through when he traveled to Rome nine months after the crash to identify the bodies and lay them to rest,” Treister speculates.
“It was such a terrible experience for him that he didn’t want to dwell on the emotional side. He was scarred emotionally for life. He was very, very close with his parents, and it was a huge personal tragedy for him.”
In January, the family celebrated Arnold Treister’s 100th birthday in Auckland. “He is fragile but totally there,” says Treister. “He said at the kiddush that this was the first time he was allowing himself to cry publicly over the tragic death of his parents.”
Amazingly, Treister adds, he only recently learned that he was named after his great-uncle. “It was emotional,” he says, “and it inspired me to get this story out. On the one hand, it is very personal and tragic; on the other, it is inspiring because of the influence that he was able to have.
“It has been a long and emotional roller coaster of a journey. I also feel that I now have an explanation as to where the family passion for Israel comes from [Treister has a brother living in Safed] and a tremendous family legacy to pass on to my grandchildren.
“It was very hard for Dad to tell me where my name came from, and it may have just been too much for him. I suppose he figured that in due time I might find out myself – and he was right!”
Treister estimates 1,000 to 1,500 expat Kiwis are currently living in Israel. They recently created a Facebook group for former New Zealanders residing in Israel at: facebook.com/groups/683518194717003.