JERUSALEM, Israel — The remains of Shimon Leib Herzl and Rivka Herzl, the paternal grandparents of Theodor Herzl, were brought from Serbia to Israel for reinterment on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem this month, closing a historic circle linking the early intellectual roots of Zionism with the Jewish state their grandson helped envision.
The reinterment followed an effort led by the World Zionist Organization and its chairman, Yaakov Hagoel, in cooperation with Serbian authorities, Israel’s Foreign Ministry and ZAKA. The project took several years and had faced repeated delays, including because of security conditions.
The remains were removed on July 29 from the Jewish cemetery in Zemun, historically known as Semlin, near Belgrade. The exhumation was conducted in accordance with Serbian legal requirements and Jewish religious procedures, according to reports from the World Zionist Organization and Israeli media.
They were placed in specially designated coffins for their journey to Israel.
The reinterment was arranged to coincide with the 77th anniversary period of Herzl’s own reburial in Jerusalem in August 1949. President Isaac Herzog and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were among the senior Israeli leaders expected to participate in the state ceremony.
The significance extended beyond bringing two members of Herzl’s family to Israel.
Shimon Leib Herzl occupied a small but intriguing place in the intellectual family history of the man who would establish modern political Zionism.
A Grandfather Connected To An Early Zionist Visionary
Shimon Leib Herzl was born in 1805 and lived in Zemun, then part of the Habsburg frontier region and today part of Belgrade.
There he was closely associated with Rabbi Yehuda Shlomo Alkalai, one of the most important religious precursors of modern Zionism. Alkalai advocated Jewish return to the Land of Israel decades before Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897.
Shimon served in the Jewish community and was associated with Alkalai’s synagogue. Accounts describe him as a synagogue official, while other reports identify him as the ceremonial shofar blower.
Alkalai argued that Jewish redemption should involve practical human action, including settlement in the Land of Israel and the political organization of the Jewish people.
Shimon reportedly embraced those ideas and discussed them during visits with his grandson in Budapest. Israeli accounts of the family’s history have consequently pointed to him as one of the influences on Herzl’s developing Jewish national consciousness.
Shimon died in 1879. Rivka, who was born in 1809, died in 1888. Both were buried in the Jewish cemetery in Zemun.
Their grandson would transform the idea of Jewish national restoration into an organized international political movement.
From Zemun To Basel To Jerusalem
Theodor Herzl was born in Budapest in 1860.
By the 1890s, he had concluded that the persistent vulnerability of European Jewry required a political and national solution. His 1896 book Der Judenstaat, commonly translated as The Jewish State, presented the case for establishing a sovereign Jewish homeland.
The following year, Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel and established the Zionist Organization, the institutional predecessor of today’s World Zionist Organization.
Herzl died in 1904, 44 years before the establishment of the State of Israel.
His will anticipated a future in which the Jewish people would be able to bring him to the land to which he had devoted the final years of his life.
Herzl asked to be buried beside his father until the Jewish people could transfer his remains to the Land of Israel. He also requested the eventual transfer of close relatives.
After Israel declared independence in 1948, that instruction could finally be fulfilled.
In August 1949, Herzl’s remains were brought from Vienna to Jerusalem and reinterred on the Jerusalem hill that became Mount Herzl, Israel’s national cemetery and one of the country’s most important sites of national remembrance.
His parents and sister were also brought to Jerusalem.
But the reunification of Herzl’s family took decades.
The Herzl Family Gradually Comes Home
Herzl’s children Hans and Pauline remained buried in Europe for more than half a century after their father’s reinterment.
Their remains were eventually transferred from Bordeaux, France, to Mount Herzl in September 2006.
Herzl’s only grandson, Stephen Theodore Norman, followed.
Norman, the son of Herzl’s daughter Margarethe, died in Washington in 1946. His remains were brought to Jerusalem and reinterred on Mount Herzl in December 2007.
Margarethe, known as Trude, was murdered in the Holocaust and has no known grave.
That left Shimon and Rivka in Zemun.
The effort to bring them to Israel gained momentum in 2021, when Hagoel raised the issue during a visit to Mount Herzl by Željka Cvijanović, then president of Republika Srpska. She agreed to assist efforts to transfer the remains.
What followed was a lengthy diplomatic, religious and logistical process involving authorities in the region and representatives of the Jewish community.
“Zion Brings Home Its Fathers”
When the remains were finally exhumed in July, representatives of the World Zionist Organization, Israeli Foreign Ministry and ZAKA were present.
Hagoel described the moment as the completion of a historical circle.
“When Zion brings home its children, it also brings home its fathers,” he said, according to Israel Hayom.
He said bringing Shimon and Rivka to Jerusalem connected “the roots of the Herzl family” with the land to which their grandson devoted his life.
The symbolism is unusual even within the history of Zionism.
Shimon Herzl lived in an era when the restoration of Jewish national life in the Land of Israel remained largely an aspiration discussed by rabbis, intellectuals and small circles of activists.
His grandson turned that aspiration into a political movement.
Forty-four years after Herzl’s death, Israel declared independence.
A year later, Herzl himself was brought to Jerusalem.
More than seven decades after that, the grandparents whose household connected young Herzl to an earlier generation of Jewish national thought have followed him.
The family’s journey unfolded in reverse chronological order. The grandson reached Jerusalem first. Other descendants followed. Finally, nearly 150 years after Shimon Herzl’s death, the preceding generation returned as well.
For the World Zionist Organization, the reinterment was therefore more than a family burial.
It linked the generation that imagined Jewish national restoration, the grandson who organized a movement to achieve it, and the sovereign State of Israel in which all three generations could finally be laid to rest.
