August 29, 2006

Herzl's blood and soil?

Here's a report from Ha'aretz about plans to bury the remains of Theodor Herzl's children in Israel. I never even considered whether he had children. The potted accounts of their lives are quite interesting:
Chief Sephardi Rabbi Shlomo Amar smoothed the way to the plan's implementation two months ago, when he authorized bringing to Israel the remains of Herzl's son Hans to Israel, although he had converted to Christianity and committed suicide.

In his will, Herzl expressed the wish that the Jewish nation would bring his remains to Israel and bury his parents, sister and children beside him there. Herzl's coffin was buried on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem on August 1949.

His eldest daughter, Paulina, died destitute in 1930 in Bordeaux, after the World Zionist Organization rejected her requests for financial support. A day later, her brother, Hans, committed suicide on her grave and was buried in the same coffin. In a letter to his second sister, Trude, before his death, Hans asked that his remains would be brought to Israel for burial beside his father. Trude perished in the Holocaust and her burial place is unknown.

In April 2001 Dr. Ariel Feldstein wrote about Herzl's children in Haaretz's Magazine. His research indicated that the Zionist establishment had acted to conceal the embarrassing affair and tried to erase Herzl's children's memory.
It's a curious way of ingathering the "exiles."

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