4/1/2011 - Theodore Herzl

We began our morning on Mt. Herzl going through the Herzl Museum.  Theodore Herzl was born in Budapest in 1860 and died in Vienna in 1904.  He formed the World Zionist Congress that met for the first time in Basil, Switzerland in 1897.  The museum was presented like a dress rehearsal for a play, moving from screen to screen and room to room telling the story of Theodore Herzl and his dream - a dream that only covered the last nine years of his life -  of a zionist state, a place Jews could come and live in peace.  His famous quote, If you will it, it is no dream, was the basis for the song Im Tirtzu by Debbie Friedman z"l.

Im tirtzu, Im tirtzu

Ein zo agada, ein zo agada

L'hiyot am chofshi b'artzeinu

B'eretz (Eretz!_ Tzion (Tzion!)  Virushalayim

 

If you will it, it is no dream;

to be a free people in our land,

in the land of Zion, and Jerusalem.

Herzl began his quest for a Zionist state following the decommissioning of Captain Alfred Dreyfus as a result of the Dreyfus affair, a political scandal that divided France in the 1890s and the early 1900s. It involved the conviction for treason in November 1894 of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young French artillery officer of Alsatian Jewish descent. Sentenced to life imprisonment for allegedly having communicated French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris, Dreyfus was sent to the penal colony at Devil's Island in French Guiana and placed in solitary confinement.

 

 

Although Herzl never stepped on Israeli land, his body was exhumed from Vienna and buried on Mt. Herzl in Jerusalem in 1949.