The Media Line: Herzl’s Family Circle Closes in Jerusalem, but Zionism’s Future Remains Unwritten  

Herzl’s Family Circle Closes in Jerusalem, but Zionism’s Future Remains Unwritten  

The reinterment of the Zionist leader’s grandparents brought five generations of family history to Mount Herzl and reopened a living debate over what his vision now requires of Israel and the Jewish world.  

By Gabriel Colodro / The Media Line  

Beneath a pale canopy at Mount Herzl, two mounds of fresh earth stand behind rows of white wreaths. The tributes bore the names of Israel’s president, government, Supreme Court, Knesset, and national institutions. On top of the caskets, a ceremonial cloth first used when Theodor Herzl was reinterred in Jerusalem in 1949 had been brought out once more.  

The scene carried the formality of a state funeral, but its central figures came from the generation before political Zionism had a name. The remains of Shimon Leib Herzl and Rivka Herzl, Theodor Herzl’s grandparents, were reinterred on Wednesday, August 5, after being transferred from the Jewish cemetery in Zemun, Serbia. President Isaac Herzog, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, World Zionist Organization leaders and members of the Herzl family attended the ceremony.  

Held on 22 of Av, the same date on the Hebrew calendar as Herzl’s reinterment 77 years earlier, the ceremony closed a long burial sequence and placed five generations of the family at Mount Herzl. It also shifted attention from the fulfillment of a family obligation to a harder question: What remains of Herzl’s struggle now that the Jewish state he envisioned has existed for nearly eight decades?  

Herzl died in Vienna in 1904. He, his parents, Jacob and Jeanette, and his sister Pauline were reinterred in Jerusalem in 1949. His children were laid to rest at Mount Herzl in 2006, followed by his only grandson in 2007. World Zionist Organization (WZO) officials described the transfer of his grandparents as the concluding chapter of that effort.  

“Usually when you come to this cemetery, it is a dark moment,” Dr. Yizhar Hess, vice chairman and acting chairman of the WZO, told The Media Line. “Here, it is not a dark moment. It is a moment of joy.” For Hess, the ceremony represented the Jewish people’s ability to carry out Herzl’s wishes in a sovereign state.  

Hess tied that fulfillment to a present political test. Herzl, he said, would be proud of Jewish sovereignty and of Israel’s contributions to commerce, scholarship and culture. “We are living that dream. We are living that history proudly,” Hess said. But he believed Herzl would also be worried about the balance between the country’s Jewish and democratic character. “If, God forbid, one of these elements would be weakened, it would be the end of the Zionist dream,” he said.