Paula Munweis was born in Minsk, then part of the Russian Empire, the daughter of Samuel Munweis and Bertha Bloch. She immigrated to New York as a teenager where the 1910 United States census gave her date of birth as 1890. She was trained as a nurse at Beth Israel Hospital in Newark, New Jersey and worked in a New York gynaecological clinic.[2][3] David Ben-Gurion met her at the home of her employer and Poale Zion supporter Dr Samuel Ellsberg in summer of 1915.