The Carpenter's Daughter at the Vatican

Attired in a black brocade suit, carrying a crocodile bag anda rare sign of respect from a woman who prefers to be bareheaded-wearing a Persian-lamb hat flown in for the occasion by El Al, Israeli Premier Golda Meir last week called on Pope Paul VI. Although the Pontiff has met Israeli leaders before,-it was his first encounter in the Vatican with the country's chief of government. Unfortunately the historic moment seemed at first to create as much friction as good will. For that matter, so did most of the major events of Mrs. Meir's six-day swing through Europe, which began with two days of dialogue and demonstration in Paris and ended with a strange Geneva meeting with Ivory Coast President Felix Houphouet-Boigny.

The Israeli Premier's troubles with the Pope were not of her making-nor, for that matter, of his. The day before she was ushered through the Vatican's Gate of Bells and into the papal library. Deputy Premier Yigal Allon undiplomatically told a Cabinet meeting in Jerusalem that Mrs. Meir was responding to an "official invitation." Mrs. Meir later emphasized that Israel had asked for the audience only after the Vatican had made it clear that the request would be answered favorably. "I didn't barge into the Vatican," she declared angrily.

Thanks in large part to Golda's humor, the meeting proved to be spirited as well as historic. As she later told a reporter for the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv, she felt the same proud feeling on behalf of Israel that she had once experienced when she entered the Kremlin as Israel's first envoy. On her way to the papal library, she commented to an aide: "Imagine me, the daughter of Moshe Mabovitz, the carpenter, going to meet the Pope of the Catholics." Replied the aide: "Wait a minute, Golda, carpentry is a very respectable profession around here."

Of the audience, Mrs. Meir told the Ma'ariv reporter: "I didn't like the opening at all. The Pope said to me at the outset that he found it hard to understand how the Jewish people, who should be merciful, behave so fiercely in their own country.

"I can't stand it when we are talked to like that. So I said to the Pope, 'Your Holiness, do you know what my earliest memory is? A pogrom in Kiev. When we were merciful and when we had no homeland and when we were weak, we were led to the gas chambers."

She remarked later that, throughout the audience, she thought of the Christian cross as the symbol under which "Jews were killed for generations." She continued: "I sat and thought to myself, here is the head of the church, sitting face to face with the Jewess from Israel, and he's listening to what I'm saying -about the Jewish people, about their home in Israel, about their rights."

Asked if voices were raised in anger during the meeting, Mrs. Meir replied: "God forbid! Everything went off in meticulous quiet, in holiness. But we gazed at each other frankly. His eyes bored deep into me, and I looked back with an open, strong, honest gaze, and I decided I would not lower my eyes under any circumstances. And I didn't."

Mrs. Meir gently rejected the Pope's offer to mediate in the Middle East peace talks. The two also discussed the problems of refugees, both Palestinian and Jewish, as well as their differing views on the status of Jerusalem. Since 1948, the Vatican has maintained that Jerusalem should be an international city, ideally under United Nations ad ministration -because of its spiritual significance to Christians, Moslems and Jews. It seemed doubtful that the Vatican had significantly altered its long time policy, but Mrs. Meir said later that the Pope had stressed that "he was not speaking" to her "of internationalizing Jerusalem." He gave her a silver dove and a two-volume reproduction of a medieval Bible, and assured her, she said later, that "It is necessary to continue the dialogue between the church and Israel."

Furor. In truth, the Israeli Premier had faced a much blunter reception a few days earlier in Paris, where she joined socialist leaders at an interna tional conference. The French government, which faces national elections in March and is already hard-pressed by French socialists, received the delegates boorishly. French radicals and Arabs, meanwhile, united in demonstrations against Mrs. Meir during one socialist meeting at the Luxembourg Palace.

Tough riot police were mustered; with an eye to Gaullist relations in the Middle East, they truncheoned French heads but not Arab ones.

The Geneva visit with one of Israel's best friends in Black Africa had been arranged to sound out Houphouet-Boigny on new Arab inroads on the continent. Israel's rapport with Black Africa is deteriorating under Moslem pressures; since March, five nations have broken relations with Jerusalem.

In response, Israel may decide to concentrate its African aid ($35 million since 1957) on fewer nations rather than try to maintain a broad alliance.

So sensitive are the issues that Hou-phouet-Boigny was apparently fright ened by the furor surrounding Mrs.

Meir's appearances elsewhere. He received her on the sly at an out-of-the-way suburban Geneva villa for a conference that lasted nearly four hours.

All the while, the Ivory Coast's ambassador to Switzerland insisted that his President was some place else and that a meeting with the Israeli Premier was the last thing on his mind.

-On his 1964 visit to the Holy Land, the Pope met both President Zalman Shazar and the late Premier Levi Eshkol.

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