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Herzl Theodor

Theodor Herzl[a] (2 May 1860 – 3 July 1904)was an Austro-Hungarian Jewish lawyer, journalist, playwright, political activist, and writer who was the father of modern political Zionism. Herzl formed the Zionist Organization and promoted Jewish immigration to Palestine in an effort to form a Jewish state.

Although he died before Israel's establishment, he is known in Hebrew as Chozeh HaMedinah (חוֹזֵה הַמְדִינָה), lit. 'Visionary of the State'.Herzl is specifically mentioned in the Israeli Declaration of Independence and is officially referred to as "the spiritual father of the Jewish State",[5] i.e. the 'visionary' who gave a concrete, practicable platform and framework to political Zionism. However, he was not the first Zionist theoretician or activist; scholars, many of them religious such as rabbis Yehuda Bibas, Zvi Hirsch Kalischer and Judah Alkalai, promoted a range of proto-Zionist ideas before him.

Theodor Herzl was born in the Dohány utca (Tabakgasse in German), a street in the Jewish quarter of Pest (now eastern part of Budapest), Kingdom of Hungary (now Hungary), to a Neolog Jewish family.[3] His father's family had migrated from Zimony (today Zemun, Serbia),[8] to Bohemia in 1739, where they were required to Germanize their family name Loebl (from Hebrew lev, 'heart') to Herzl (diminutive of Ger. Herz; 'little heart').

He was the second child of Jeanette and Jakob Herzl, who were German-speaking, assimilated Jews. It is believed Herzl was of both Ashkenazi and Sephardic lineage predominately through his paternal line and to a lesser extent through the maternal line.

Jakob Herzl (1836–1902), Theodor's father, was a highly successful businessman. Herzl had one sister, Pauline, a year older than he was; she died on 7 February 1878, of typhus.[11] Theodor lived with his family in a house next to the Dohány Street Synagogue (formerly known as Tabakgasse Synagogue) located in Belváros, the inner city of the historical old town of Pest, in the eastern section of Budapest.

In his youth, Herzl was aspired to follow the footsteps of Ferdinand de Lesseps,[14] builder of the Suez Canal, but did not succeed in the sciences and instead developed a growing enthusiasm for poetry and humanities. This passion later developed into a successful career in journalism and a less-celebrated pursuit of playwrighting.[15] According to Amos Elon,[16] as a young man, Herzl was an ardent Germanophile who saw the Germans as the best Kulturvolk (cultured people) in Central Europe and embraced the German ideal of Bildung, whereby reading great works of literature by Goethe and Shakespeare could allow one to appreciate the beautiful things in life and thus become a morally better person (the Bildung theory tended to equate beauty with goodness).[17] Herzl believed that through Bildung Hungarian Jews such as himself could shake off their "shameful Jewish characteristics" caused by long centuries of impoverishment and oppression, and become civilized Central Europeans, a true Kulturvolk along the German lines.

In 1878, after the death of his sister, Pauline, the family moved to Vienna, Austria-Hungary, and lived in the 9th district, Alsergrund. At the University of Vienna, Herzl studied law. As a young law student, Herzl became a member of the German nationalist Burschenschaft (fraternity) Albia, which had the motto Ehre, Freiheit, Vaterland ("Honor, Freedom, Fatherland").[18] He later resigned in protest at the organisation's antisemitism.

After a brief legal career in the University of Vienna and Salzburg,[20] he devoted himself to journalism and literature, working as a journalist for a Viennese newspaper and a correspondent for Neue Freie Presse, in Paris, occasionally making special trips to London and Istanbul. He later became literary editor of Neue Freie Presse, and wrote several comedies and dramas for the Viennese stage. His early work did not focus on Jewish life. It was of the feuilleton order, descriptive rather than political. Herzl did not live to see the rejection of the Uganda plan. At 5 p.m. 3 July 1904, in Edlach, a village inside Reichenau an der Rax, Lower Austria, Theodor Herzl, having been diagnosed with a heart issue earlier in the year, died of cardiac sclerosis. A day before his death, he told the Reverend William H. Hechler: "Greet Palestine for me. I gave my heart's blood for my people."

His will stipulated that he should have the poorest-class funeral without speeches or flowers and he added, "I wish to be buried in the vault beside my father, and to lie there till the Jewish people shall take my remains to Israel".[61] Nevertheless, some six thousand followed Herzl's hearse, and the funeral was long and chaotic. Despite Herzl's request that no speeches be made, a brief eulogy was delivered by David Wolffsohn. Hans Herzl, then thirteen, read the kaddish.

First buried at the Viennese cemetery in the district of Döbling, his remains were brought to Israel in 1949 and buried on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, which was named after him. The coffin was draped in a blue and white pall decorated with a Star of David circumscribing a Lion of Judah and seven gold stars recalling Herzl's original proposal for a flag of the Jewish state.

Courtesy--wikipedia
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