Israel's offspring
By Gil Hoffman

Theodor Herzl (1860-1904)
A writer and a statesman, Herzl founded national Zionism and the World Zionist Organization, which elevated the Jewish problem to an international political subject of primary importance. His name and life work, the political resurrection of the Jewish people, are engraved in the national consciousness and clothed in grandeur and legend.

From an early age he was aware of the Jewish problem, antisemitism, and the persecution of Jews, but it was the Dreyfus case that awakened in him national Jewish feeling and brought him to the conclusion that the Jewish problem could only be solved by political means.

The concept of emergence from the Diaspora and return to Zion found expression in his book The Jewish State, which was written in 1896. Herzl convened six Zionist Congresses between 1897 and 1902, in which the tools for Zionist activism were forged.

He died in 1904 and was buried in Vienna, but after the establishment of the State of Israel his remains were reinterred on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem in the summer of 1949.

Herzl had three children and one grandchild
There are no direct descendants of Herzl alive today, but there are many distant cousins of the Zionist leader in Israel and around the world. Herzl died young and poor, and, sadly his three children did not fare well either.

Pauline had a failed marriage, became a philanderer and a drug addict and died in a hospital in Bordeaux, France, at age 40 in 1930.

Hans was sent to an Orthodox Jewish boarding school in England and won a scholarship to St. John's College in Cambridge. He left Cambridge without obtaining a degree and had a difficult time earning a living as a journalist and translator.

Hans's search for "the universal truth" which could unite disparate nations drew him away from his limited links with Judaism and towards the Baptists, the Catholic Church, the Hebrew-Christians, the Quakers, and finally to liberal Judaism, whose teachings he appreciated in spite of its clearly anti-Zionist bias at the time.

He committed suicide in Bordeaux in 1930 at the age of 39 on the day of his sister's funeral.

Stricken with self-doubt and self-hate, he wrote shortly before his suicide, "Whom the gods would destroy; they first drive mad."

Trude was schizophrenic and had to be hospitalized many times. The Nazis sent her to Theresienstadt, where she died in 1943 at the age of 50.

Trude's son Stephen Theodor Neumann, Herzl's only grandchild, also went to school in England and changed his surname to Norman. He served as an officer in the British Army in World War II and visited Palestine in 1945 and 1946 on his way to the Far East and back. He later described in moving words his impression of the Yishuv. He never married and committed suicide by jumping to his death from a Washington bridge in 1946 at the age of 28.

Among Herzl's more distant cousins, Tova Herzl is the minister for congressional affairs in the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Liora Herzl is head of the international research department of the Foreign Affairs Ministry. She has been stationed in Houston and the Hague, was head of the ministry's arms control team, and served as liaison to the IDF strategic planning department.

David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973)
Theodor Herzl (1860-1904)
Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952)
Menachem Begin (1913-1992)
Rabbi Isaac Halevy Herzog (1888-1959)