By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, September 21, 2006

JERUSALEM, Sept. 20 -- In his last will and testament, an ailing Theodor Herzl outlined what seemed to be a simple wish. The urbane Austro-Hungarian journalist who became the leading theoretician of Zionism wanted the Jewish people to bury him, along with his father, sister and children, in their future nation.

Herzl died in 1904, 44 years before his followers realized his goal of establishing a democratic Jewish state in historical Palestine. Among their early acts was to bring Herzl's remains from Vienna for reburial in a mountaintop cemetery here named in his honor.

But it took until Wednesday for the rest of Herzl's wish to be fulfilled. In that nearly six-decade delay lies the story of a troubled family, revived in recent days with the arrival of his children's remains, and the enduring question of how religious and secular forces can coexist here. In the heat of a late summer afternoon, two coffins holding the bodies of Hans and Paulina Herzl, exhumed a day earlier from a grave in France, were lowered into the ground here at Mount Herzl national cemetery.

Their tombs, just down a tree-lined path from their father's hilltop shrine, filled an empty space that had awaited them for decades amid the graves of the Herzl family. Speaking to 250 invited guests, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the Jewish people owed Herzl "such a great national and historical debt that there is none above it."

"We owe him -- the visionary of the state -- also a personal debt, a debt of respect," Olmert said. "And that is the debt of a full fulfillment of his will."

But many Israelis opposed the burial of the Herzl children, which comes at a time when the government is working to keep the ideas of the early Zionist leaders fresh for a new generation, including the establishment in recent years of Herzl Day.

"We are dealing here with the children of someone who is part of the national pantheon," said Shlomo Avineri, a professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a scholar of Zionist history. "But I don't necessarily think the children should be a part of it."

The controversy surrounding the final resting place of Hans and Paulina Herzl began when Israel first moved Herzl's body for reburial.

At the time, the son and daughter he adored lay in a Jewish cemetery in Bordeaux, a city they had no personal attachment to other than that it happened to be the place where Paulina died of an unknown disease in 1930.

It was known that she had been using morphine during her illness. But Israel's new government, guided by religious advisers, saw no reason why she could not be reburied next to her father. Trouble arose, however, when Hans killed himself in anguish days after learning that his sister had died; suicide is proscribed under Jewish law.

Hans, who had converted to Christianity two decades after his father's death, had expressed doubt in writing about his father's project, even at a time of rising anti-Semitism in Europe. Hans believed in a Jewish-Christian alliance, with the pope representing the Jewish people in the world at large.

"My father was a great man, and I loved him very much, but he erred when he agreed to limit his idealism and establish a state," Hans wrote in a series of letters published in the Israeli media this week.

"First they should bring Jews to be buried in the land of Israel," said David Tal, a member of parliament from Olmert's Kadima party. "When they are done with that, then they can think about bringing those who converted to other religions."

Most of the opposition has come from ultra-Orthodox Jews, who have never subscribed to Herzl's vision of a secular Jewish state. Ultra-Orthodox members of Israel's parliament announced a boycott of the reburial services, and the only one of Jerusalem's deputy mayors who is not a rabbi was the city government's sole representative at the ceremony.

The ultra-Orthodox newspaper Hamodia published an opinion article Wednesday that called Hans "the apostate son of the founder of Zionism" and characterized Paulina as a drug addict -- "two descendants of Herzl who are the exact opposite of anything Jewish."

The push to fulfill Herzl's will languished for decades until Ariel Feldestein, the academic director of Sapir College in the Negev region, came across an envelope stamped "Top Secret" while he was working in the Zionist archives here in 2001. After receiving permission to open it, he found papers outlining the government's objections to carrying out Herzl's wish. Those concerns centered on Hans's suicide and conversion.

Soon afterward, Feldestein said, he appealed to the government, then led by Ariel Sharon, to revive the case. But Sharon declined, and the project stalled until Olmert took office this year. Zeev Bielski, who last year became head of the Jewish Agency for Israel, made the issue a priority.

In recent weeks, one of Israel's two chief rabbis, Shlomo Amar, ruled that Jewish law permits the Herzl children to be buried in the national cemetery. Amar based his opinion on precedent, as well as provisions in Jewish law that make allowances in cases of suicide for those suffering from mental instability.

Months before his death, Hans joined a synagogue in London, a fact Amar confirmed during a trip there. Amar said he found it telling that Bordeaux's rabbi allowed the Herzls to be buried in a Jewish cemetery, evidence that he believed Hans was Jewish.

"We closed the circle," Bielski said. "This is important not only for us as individuals, but also as a state. Promises we made, promises we kept."