Herzl’s grandparents’ remains reinterred in Jerusalem

Zionist visionary Theodor Herzl learned his commitment to creating a Jewish State from the deeds of his grandparents, President Isaac Herzog says at a state ceremony marking the reinterment of their remains on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.

“Dreams are not inherited in writing,” Herzog says. “They are passed down at the Sabbath table.”

The bodies of Shimon and Rivka Herzl were buried next to their grandson’s grave on Mount Herzl in a ceremony exactly 77 years after Herzl was reburied there on August 5, 1949. Their bodies were exhumed last week from their graves in Belgrade, Serbia.

Herzog traces how Rabbi Shimon Leib — a humble synagogue gabbai — absorbed the proto-Zionist teachings of the local Rabbi Yehuda Alkalai, the proto-Zionist leader who led the family’s synagogue and unwittingly set in motion a dream that his grandson would later transform into a movement.

When Alkalai’s granddaughter and Herzl’s grandson both appeared at the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, Herzog says, “it was not a coincidence, it was the product of tradition.”

“Not every person gets to found a state,” Herzog says, “but every person can be the one who carries the vision home and places it on the table of their home.”

Herzl, who died in 1904, is widely seen as the founder of the modern Zionist movement.