Herzl family
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Theodor Herzl, né Binyamin Zev Herzl, was born to Jacob Herzl (1835–1902), a wealthy merchant and banker and Janet (1836–1911) née Diamant. His grandparents were Simon Leib Herzl (1805–1879) and his wife Rebecca (1809–1888) née Beilis, and Herman Diamant (1805–1871) and his wife Johanna Katrina (1806–1872) née Abeles.
Childhood and youth
Herzl was the second child of Jacob and Janet. His paternal grandfather was from the same community as Rabbi Yehuda Alcalay, on of the Heralds of Zionism.[1] Apparently, Herzl was descended on his father side from Portuguese Jews[2][3], and of the popular Rabbi Joseph Taitatzak[4] from Thessaloniki.
Sister
Paulina (1858–1877), Theodor's older sister, died at age 19 of typhoid. It is believed that her death was the reason for the Herzl family's moving from Budapest to Vienna.
Youth
At the age of 26, Theodor fell in love with a 13-year-old girl called Madeleine Kurtz, about whom he wrote in his diary that she was "his only true love", and "she is sweet, sweet, sweet ... her precious eyes, her golden, golden, hair ... I did not , I found it difficult not to behave as an adult and say that I love her."[citation needed] After Madeleine died from an illness at a young age, Herzl developed feelings for the daughter of Dr Levysohn, editor of the Berliner Tageblatt, but decided to sever the connection, as her father was an apostate Jew and she was born a Christian.
Wife
Julia (called Julie and Julie) née Naschauer (1868–1907), born on 1 February 1868, daughter of Jacob (1837–1894) and Johanna (1843–1900). Theodor married on June 25, 1889.
Due to his great activity in the Zionist movement, Herzl did not devote time or resources to stay with his family. Julia died, probably of heart disease, in 1907, at age 39, three years after her husband, after suffering from depression and hospitalization in a psychiatric hospital. Her body was cremated at her request, and the burial place of her ashes is unknown.
Children
Julia and Theodor Herzl had three children. In his will, Herzl appointed his friends David Wolffsohn, Moritz Reichenfeld and he to be the guardians of his children. Upon Herzl's death, it was realized that Herzl had spent Julia's dowry and that he left his family without adequate revenue sources (Paulina was then 14 years old, 13 years old Hans and Trude was 11), so all responsibility for the young orphans was accepted the Zionist movement and tha appointed guardians.
Paulina
Herzl's eldest daughter, whose Hebrew name was Tirtzah, born on 29 March, 1890. After a great number of romantic relationships, she married Joseph , but divorced shortly afterwards, and severed ties with her family and her guardians as appointed by Herzl. She suffered from congestive heart failure, and was hospitalized several times in a psychiatric institution. At the age of 39, she was admitted to hospital in Bordeaux, France, where she died as a result of an overdose of morphine on 8 September 1930. Despite her request in her will to be buried next to her father in Vienna, her family and the Jewish community decided to inter her in Bordeaux.
Hans
Hans, Herzl's second son, was born on 10 June 1891. Herzl neither gave him a Hebrew name nor circumcised him. (After Herzl's death, the Jewish community arranged a circumcision for Hans and gave him the Hebrew name Shimon.) When Theodor Herzl died, Hans was 13 years old.
In accordance with Herzl's wishes, Hans was sent to study in a religious Jewish boarding school in England. When his mother died, he returned to Vienna and collapsed because of feelings of guilt for not being with his mother in her last days and was hospitalized in a sanatorium. After his release he returned to his studies in England, which he completed successfully.
Hans was accepted to a university.
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and during World War I, he joined the British Army. When released in 1919, he could not find a vocation and made a living primarily from translating his father's writings. At age 24, he converted to Christianity and became a member of the Baptist church. He changed denominations several times, trying Catholicism, Protestantism, the Baptist church, Unitarianism and the Quakers, and finally returning to Judaism. Hans had never married. When he heard of his sister Paulina's fatal illness, he abandoned his pursuits and travelled to Bordeaux to visit her. After spending time at her bedside and seeing that her condition was improving, he returned to Britain where he received the news that his sister died. He returned to Bordeaux and committed suicide by gunshot on 15 September 1930, a week after the death of Pauline. He was 38 years old. Hans asked that his body and his sister's body should be buried together in Vienna. In his will, in which he explained that he committed suicide because of his sense of failure, he suggested exhuming the bodies of his father, his sister and himself, along with his mother's ashes, to be re-interred in Israel.
In the book "הציונות המאוחרת" (published by Shiloh in 1953), it is stated that Hans' suicide resulted from a broken heart, resulting from his love for the , the daughter of a local nobleman. She was 15, while he was 38, and due to the resulting situation, Hans preferred to end his life. This explanation for his suicide is also mentioned in a booklet published in Vienna in 1966/ 1967, but its source is unknown.
Margarete Gertrude
Margarete Gertrude Herzl, known by her nickname "Trude" (her Jewish name was Frume), the third daughter of Theodor Herzl and his wife, Julia, was born in Paris on 20 May 1893. She was 11 at the time of her father's desth. After the death of her mother, when she was 14, she was sent to live with her aunt. Her aunt made her disassociate herself from her peers and forbade her to bring friends home, so Trude immersed herself in reading books (mainly novel and novellas). Trude studied at French-language teaching when in university. After the death of the wife of her guardian, Wolfson, she moved into his house and helped him both in managing the household and in the affairs of the Zionist movement. She participated in the Tenth Zionist Congress in Basel, in 1913.
In 1916, she suffered a nervous breakdown, partly because her connection with her brother, Hans, had been cut off due to his being a soldier in an enemy army (British Army), and she was hospitalized for a while in a convalescent home for nervous patients in Brohl.
Trude was the only one of Herzl's children to have a family. On 23 April 1917, she married the Czech Jewish textile industrialist Richard Neumann, who was divorced and by 27 years her senior, a friend of one of the guardians of Herzl's children - Moritz Reichenfeld. In 1918, she gave birth to a girl, Herzl's only grandchild. Shortly after birth, she was sent to several months to the Inzersdorf mental hospital in Vienna.
In the following years the Neumanns attempted to separate, then got back together, and throughout that time Trude was often hospitalized in a mental hospital. Her condition deteriorated following the death of her two siblings, Pauline and Hans, and from 1931 she was admitted to the Inzersdorf hospital permanently.
In 1940, as part of the forced segregation of the Jews from the general population, she was transferred to the Jewish psychiatric hospital , and in 1941, with the closure of all Jewish institutions, she was transferred to a public psychiatric hospital.
In September 1942, when the Nazis removed the Jewish inmates from the psychiatric hospital of Vienna, she was sent to Theresienstadt, where she remained in the camp hospital for six months before she died (probably from hunger) on 15 March 1943. Her remains were cremated.
Herzl's grandson
Trude's son, Stephen Theodore, the last descendant of Theodor Herzl, was born on 21 April in 1918. Due to the rise of Nazism, he was sent in 1933 to study at a boarding school in England. He received British citizenship and changed his name from "Neumann" to "Norman" (according to another version, to "Munro"). He served during World War II in India as an officer in the Artillery Corps of the British Army. After his release in 1945, on the way from India to England, he visited the Land of Israel[5] and received with respect and affection. He received offers to settle in the country (both from kibbutzim and associations). His answer was that he would consider it after finishing his service in the army. He was assigned as an attache to the Colonial Ministry of Science of the British embassy[clarification needed] in Washington, DC. After learning of his parents' death in the Holocaust, he committed suicide by jumping off a bridge on Massachusetts Avenue on November 25 1946.
Raising his children and grandson bones Israel
On 19 September 2006, in an official ceremony, the bones of Hans and Paulina were exhumed from the Jewish cemetery in Bordeaux and on the next day, 20 September, they were buried in the he in Mount Herzl near the grave of their father. (Herzl's second daughter, Trude, died in Holocaust and was cremated). The reburial of Herzl's children and the fulfillment of his last will and testament were brought up by Dr. Ariel Feldstein. Dr. Feldstein was the first to expose the long-standing disregard for the will of Herzl.
Whereas arrangements for re-interment of the bones of Herzl, his parents and his sister Pauline in Israel were made immediately after the establishment of the state by a delegation sent to Vienna after November 1947, they ignored the part of the will which Herzl requested that his other descendants who will have died by that time should be buried in the Jewish state.
Dr. Feldstein was able to persuade the government of Israel and the World Zionist Organization to correct this historical, ethical and legal injustice. His activity in research and public relations, with the consent of the Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, of the president of the World Zionist Organization, Zeev Bielski and of Rabbi Shlomo Amar, the Rishon le-Zion, paved the way for the execution of the will.[6]
On 5 December 2007, the bones of Herzl's grandson, Stephen Norman, were reburied alongside his family.[7]
References
- ^ Ruth Winkler, Rabbi Yehuda Alcalay to Dr. Theodor (Binyamin Ze'ev) Herzl - connects and separates their thinking]
- ^ Isaac Perry (Friedman),History of the Jews in Hungary , Volume Three, p '54.
- ^ http://www.archive.org/stream/daslebentheodor00friegoog/daslebentheodor00friegoog_djvu.txt Herzl life - by Adolf Friedman, Iodish Frlag, Berlin, 1919 - in German].
- ^ According to the testimony of Herzl to his confidante, the journalist Aaron Marcus from Hamburg, according to "שיחות הרצי"ה" and "עיטורי כהנים", p. 126.
- ^ Norman, Stephen Theodore (2006). "תחנת ביניים פלשתינה". Azure (25). Shalem Center: 94–101. Retrieved 23 December 2012.
- ^ Vered Levi-Barzilai (15 September 2009). "בזכות חזון של איש אחד, צוואת הרצל תתגשם". Haaretz. Retrieved 23 December 2012.
- ^ Anshil Fefer (4 December 2007). "תשטוף את העפר מהעיניים, בנימין זאב". Haaretz. Retrieved 23 December 2012.
Further reading
- Amos Elon, ' A German Requiem - Jews in Germany before Hitler, 1743-1933' (English: Danny Orbach), Tel Aviv: Publishing Dvir, 2004.
- Isaiah Klinov, הרצל חוזה המדינה, an album, Tel Aviv: La'am publishing, 1950.
- Yaakov Veinshel, Hans Herzl (Template:Hebrew), Hoze publishing, 1945.
- Alex Bain, 'Herzl, biography, Jerusalem: The Zionist Library by the Zionist Executive, 1977.
External links
- burial case of Herzl's children, Site Exchange