 |
| Budapest form St. Gellert Hill |
I spent my New Year holiday in Budapest. It was a very beautiful city with Danube River crossing between Buda and Pest. I found stunning castles in Buda area and busy business area in Pest. Buda Castle, Fishermen Bation, St. Mathias Church, Hospital in the Rock, Citadella, and finally to the Gellert Bath, a thermal bath from Ottoman time. In Pest I wandered lots of Christmas markets, Parliament Hall which is claimed as the biggest parliament building in the world, St. Stephen Basilica, and Vajahunyad Castle (so-called Castle of Dracula of Budapest), Hero monument, and more unique things taste so Hungarian. In Pest, my sight was strucked by a Mosque-like building, it was so huge, I was thinking it was really a mosque. However, when I checked it in detail I could see two tablets hanged between two doomed minarets and lots of David stars decorating it. I understood that it was a Synagogue, temple of Judaism.
 |
| The second biggest Synagogue in Europe Source: wikipedia |
I did not want to waste my time and curiosity, I got inside and checked what they have inside. It was so amazing learning about the history of Jewish people living in Budapest in past times. Thanks for the English speaking guide. for my surprise, I found out that in this area, born a man behind the Zionism movement, Theodor (Binyamin Ze'ev) Herzl. He is the visionary
behind modern Zionism and the reinstitution of a Jewish homeland.
 |
| the Biggest Parliament in the world |
Herzl (born May 2, 1860; died July 3, 1904) was born
in Budapest in 1860. He was educated in the spirit of the German-Jewish
Enlightenment, and learned to appreciate secular culture. In 1878 the family
moved to Vienna, and in 1884 Herzl was awarded a doctorate of law from the
University of Vienna. He became a writer, playwright and journalist. The Paris
correspondent of the influential liberal Vienna newspaper Neue Freie Presse was
none other than Theodor Herzl.
Herzl first encountered the anti-Semitism that would
shape his life and the fate of the Jews in the twentieth century while studying
at the University of Vienna (1882). Later, during his stay in Paris as a
journalist, he was brought face-to-face with the problem. At the time, he
regarded the Jewish problem as a social issue and wrote a drama, The Ghetto
(1894), in which assimilation and conversion are rejected as solutions. He
hoped that The Ghetto would lead to debate and ultimately to a solution, based on
mutual tolerance and respect between Christians and Jews.
The
Dreyfus Affair
In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in
the French army, was unjustly accused of treason, mainly because of the
prevailing anti-Semitic atmosphere. Herzl witnessed mobs shouting “Death to the
Jews” in France, the home of the French Revolution, and resolved that there was
only one solution: the mass immigration of Jews to a land that they could call
their own. Thus, the Dreyfus Case became one of the determinants in the genesis
of Political Zionism.
 |
| Theodor Harzl |
Herzl concluded that anti-Semitism was a stable and
immutable factor in human society, which assimilation did not solve. He mulled
over the idea of Jewish sovereignty, and, despite ridicule from Jewish leaders,
published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State, 1896). Herzl argued that the
essence of the Jewish problem was not individual but national. He declared that
the Jews could gain acceptance in the world only if they ceased being a
national anomaly. The Jews are one people, he said, and their plight could be
transformed into a positive force by the establishment of a Jewish state with
the consent of the great powers. He saw the Jewish question as an international
political question to be dealt with in the arena of international politics.
Herzl proposed a practical program for collecting
funds from Jews around the world by a company to be owned by stockholders,
which would work toward the practical realization of this goal. (This
organization, when it was eventually formed, was called the Zionist
Organization.) He saw the future state as a model social state, basing his
ideas on the European model of the time, of a modern enlightened society. It
would be neutral and peace-seeking, and of a secular nature.
In his Zionist novel, Altneuland (Old New Land, 1902),
Herzl pictured the future Jewish state as a socialist utopia. He envisioned a
new society that was to rise in the Land of Israel on a cooperative basis
utilizing science and technology in the development of the Land.
He included detailed ideas about how he saw the future
state’s political structure, immigration, fundraising, diplomatic relations,
social laws and relations between religion and the state. In Altneuland, the
Jewish state was foreseen as a pluralist, advanced society, a “light unto the
nations.” This book had a great impact on the Jews of the time and became a
symbol of the Zionist vision in the Land of Israel.
A
Movement Is Started
Herzl's ideas were met with enthusiasm by the Jewish
masses in Eastern Europe, although Jewish leaders were less ardent. Herzl
appealed to wealthy Jews such as Baron Hirsch and Baron Rothschild, to join the
national Zionist movement, but in vain. He then appealed to the people, and the
result was the convening of the First Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland,
on August 2931, 1897.
 |
| Shoes in Danube, here Jews were shot and thrown in the Danube |
The Congress was the first interterritorial gathering
of Jews on a national and secular basis. Here the delegates adopted the Basle
Program, the program of the Zionist movement, and declared, “Zionism seeks to
establish a home for the Jewish people in Palestine secured under public law.”
At the Congress the World Zionist Organization was established as the political
arm of the Jewish people, and Herzl was elected its first president.
Herzl convened six Zionist Congresses between 1897 and
1902. It was here that the tools for Zionist activism were forged: Otzar
Hityashvut Hayehudim, the Jewish National Fund and the movement’s newspaper Die
Welt.
After the First Zionist Congress, the movement met
yearly at an international Zionist Congress. In 1936, the center of the Zionist
movement was transferred to Jerusalem.
Uganda
Isn’t Zion
Herzl saw the need for encouragement by the great
powers of the aims of the Jewish people in the Land. Thus, he traveled to the
Land of Israel and Istanbul in 1898 to meet with Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany
and the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. The meeting with Wilhelm was a failure -
the monarch dismissed Herzl’s political entreaties with snide anti-Semitic
remarks. When these efforts proved fruitless, he turned to Great Britain, and
met with Joseph Chamberlain, the British colonial secretary and others. The
only concrete offer he received from the British was the proposal of a Jewish
autonomous region in east Africa, in Uganda.
In 1899, in an essay entitled “The Family Affliction”
written for The American Hebrew, Herzl wrote, “Anyone who wants to work in
behalf of the Jews needs - to use a popular phrase - a strong stomach.”
The 1903 Kishinev pogrom and the difficult state of
Russian Jewry, witnessed firsthand by Herzl during a visit to Russia, had a
profound effect on him. He requested that the Russian government assist the
Zionist Movement to transfer Jews from Russia to Eretz Yisrael.
At the Sixth Zionist Congress (1903), Herzl proposed
the British Uganda Program as a temporary refuge for Jews in Russia in
immediate danger. While Herzl made it clear that this program would not affect
the ultimate aim of Zionism, a Jewish entity in the Land of Israel, the
proposal aroused a storm at the Congress and nearly led to a split in the
Zionist movement. The Uganda Program was finally rejected by the Zionist
movement at the Seventh Zionist Congress in 1905.
Herzl died in Vienna in 1904, of pneumonia and a weak
heart overworked by his incessant efforts on behalf of Zionism. By then the
movement had found its place on the world political map. In 1949, Herzl’s
remains were brought to Israel and reinterred on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.
Herzl’s books Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”) and
Altneuland (“Old New Land”), his plays and articles have been published
frequently and translated into many languages. His name has been commemorated
in the Herzl Forests at Ben Shemen and Hulda, the world's first Hebrew
gymnasium — “Herzliya” — which was established in Tel Aviv, the town of
Herzliya in the Sharon and neighborhoods and streets in many Israeli towns and
cities.
Herzl coined the phrase “If you will, it is no
fairytale,” which became the motto of the Zionist movement. Although at the
time no one could have imagined it, Zionism led, only fifty years later, to the
establishment of the independent State of Israel.
