For many years, Am Shalom member Joanne Hoffman ran the resale shop at Mount Sinai Hospital in Chicago’s Lawndale neighborhood. She always kept an eye out for items that might be special or significant to the Jewish Community.

Last year she walked into the shop to find a large tub of interesting pictures taken by a photographer in Israel before the state was founded. The photos had been brought in by a family who’d cleaned out a relative’s apartment and planned to throw them away. There was an Associated Press verification on several of them with the name Carter Davidson. Joanne sensed their significance and brought them to Am Shalom.    

After doing some investigation through his New York Times obituary, she learned that Carter Davidson was born in Alabama and began writing for newspapers in Ohio and Indiana before joining the Associated Press in 1943. He became the Bureau Chief in London and was assigned to the Middle East  from 1946-1949. He filed an exclusive story of a meeting in 1947 between Menachem Begin and the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine calling for Jewish sovereignty in Palestine and Trans-Jordan before the state was announced.

Carter was transferred to Paris in 1949 and joined the staff of the Chicago Sun-Times in 1952. He became  Editorial Director of WBBM News in 1960 after serving as Director of the Council of Foreign Relations. He wrote and delivered all of their editorials.    

Carter died of a heart attack at his home in Chicago in December 1968 at the age of 52. His beautiful photographs from Israel now hang in the administrative offices of Am Shalom. Had it not been for Joanne, the pictures would have been thrown away and this incredible history never discovered.