By Theia Chatelle
JERUSALEM — When World Zionist Organization officials working with the Israeli Foreign Ministry opened the grave of Theodor Herzl’s grandfather on July 29 in Zemun, Serbia, they found it empty.
Shimon Leib Herzl was not buried beneath his tombstone. So they kept digging to the side of his wife Rivka’s grave and found his remains there, according to Yizhar Hess, the WZO’s acting chair, who was present at the exhumation.
On Aug. 5, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog in attendance, Herzl’s grandparents were reinterred on Mount Herzl.
“The long journey of the Herzl family, from foreign soil to the soil of Zion, ends here today on Mount Herzl,” Netanyahu said. “The vision has arisen and become reality. Zionism has won.”
The reburial came 77 years to the Hebrew date after Herzl himself was laid to rest on the Jerusalem hillside that bears his name.
The Knesset had voted on Aug. 10, 1949, to bring his remains from Vienna in one of its first acts.
The WZO says the ceremony completes the last unfulfilled clause of Herzl’s 1903 will, which instructed that his body be transferred to the Land of Israel along with the coffins of his father, his sister Pauline and several close relatives.
Yaakov Hagoel, chair of the WZO, said the WZO was closing a historic circle and reconnecting the Herzl family’s roots to the land Herzl had devoted his life to. “When Zion brings her children home, she also brings home their forebears,” he said.
Diplomats and officials from across the Zionist institutional world filled the Mount Herzl plaza. Seated near the family plot were Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana, Deputy Supreme Court President Noam Sohlberg, Police Commissioner Danny Levy, the Serbian ambassador to Israel and Sheikh Muwaffaq Tarif, spiritual leader of Israel’s Druze community.
An honor guard carried the two caskets and set them on a pedestal before the crowd. The mood was both somber and defiant.
</span>Shimon Leib Herzl was born in Zemun in 1805, the son of a rabbi. He served as gabbai in the Sephardic synagogue where Yehuda Alkalai was rabbi.
Decades before the First Zionist Congress in 1897, Alkalai argued that Jews could not wait for the messiah to arrive, that they would have to buy land and petition the Ottoman sultan themselves.
Today he is considered a forerunner of Zionism. Whether his ideas were the impetus for his congregant’s grandson, the eventual founder of the Jewish state, has never been definitively established.
Theodor Herzl’s bris was held in Zemun.
The Herzl most people know is the assimilated Viennese journalist who found Jewish nationalism at the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, the French army general falsely convicted of treason in an anti-Semitic affair at the turn of the 20th century.
Herzl’s Bar Mitzvah was held at a synagogue in Budapest that was associated with the Hungarian Neolog movement, which permits music on Shabbat but seats men and women separately.
The Herzl family plot on Mount Herzl has been filling in for 77 years. Theodor Herzl was reinterred there in 1949. His parents and his sister Pauline were brought as well. The bodies of his two eldest children, Pauline and Hans, came from Bordeaux in 2006. The remains of his grandson Stephen Norman, who died by suicide in Washington in 1946, followed in 2007.
One member of the family is still missing. Trude, Herzl’s youngest daughter and Stephen Norman’s mother, died at Theresienstadt in 1943. Her remains were never recovered.
Oded Feuer, who directs the WZO’s Herzl Center at the entrance to Mount Herzl, said:
“You can look at the Herzl family as the story of a Jewish family in the diaspora in Europe: The old grandfather was Orthodox, somewhere in the Balkans, in Serbia. And then starts the traveling of the Jew, the wandering Jew. His kids moved to central Europe, and they maintained a connection with Judaism, but in a different way, more secular.”
Asked whether removing Jewish remains from Europe in 2026 says something about the future of Jewish life there, Feuer declined the premise.
“This is not our goal,” he said. “This is not the reason for it.” Then he added, “Maybe I’m too optimistic and too naive. I’m choosing to be.”
