A Family Reunion for Grandson of Zionism's Founder

Rockville History Buff Lobbied to Have Man's Remains Sent to Israel

Sixty-one years after he was buried at a windy hilltop cemetery in Southeast Washington, Stephen Theodore Norman, the only grandchild of Zionism's founder, was exhumed yesterday after a five-year campaign to have him buried near his family in Israel.

As morticians in plastic jumpsuits sifted with their gloved hands through mud and water in the five-foot grave crater, Jerry Klinger stood alongside. Klinger, a passionate Jewish history buff from Rockville, was watching the realization of years of intense -- and often ignored -- lobbying for what he sees as a battle for the legacy of Theodor Herzl and the Zionist movement Herzl founded more than a century ago in Europe.

After thousands of e-mails, letters, visits with Israel's top politicians and rabbis, and other efforts -- even commissioning research on the mental health of Herzl and his offspring -- Klinger is seeing his dream come true. The remains of Norman, Herzl's only descendant to embrace Zionism, will be flown Monday night to Israel. He will be buried Wednesday on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, with top national officials taking part.

Mount Herzl, where Norman's grandfather is buried, is akin to a smaller version of Arlington National Cemetery; such Israeli giants as Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin are buried there.

"His family represented the idea of a better world for millions of people -- not just Jews, for the world," said Klinger, 59, looking out at the graves at Adas Israel Cemetery on Alabama Avenue, many of which date to the 1800s. "And he was just buried there and forgotten."

Herzl is among Israel's most famous names. Every town has a Herzl street. There is a city named after him. His face is on the Israeli currency. But the name also is linked to a series of family tragedies.

Historians of Israel and modern Jewish history say Herzl's goal -- finding Jews an escape from murderous European anti-Semitism -- and his philosophy have simply faded to the background as time has passed and Israel's contemporary conflicts have come to the fore. Herzl, who died 44 years before Israel's establishment, envisioned a utopian, egalitarian society and peaceful relations between Arabs and Jews. But by 1975, the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution calling Zionism a form of racism. The resolution was rescinded in 1991, but advocates of Israel worry that the stigma will never disappear.

Herzl's name has also been attached to great tragedy in his family. The Hungarian-born journalist died at 44. His elder daughter suffered from mental illness and apparently died of a drug overdose. Her brother, who had converted to Christianity, committed suicide when he learned of her death. Herzl's younger daughter, who was in and out of mental institutions, was the only one to have a child -- Stephen Norman, who became a captain in the British Army and was posted to the embassy in Washington in 1946.

Several months before, he visited Palestine, the only member of his family to go there. Norman wrote in his journal from the trip that he "believed in the idea and the aims of Zionism, and in the moral, ethical, economic, and social need for it that had been made even more urgent and important by world events and the tremendous problems created by the new scientific anti-Semitism of the last decades."

Commenting on the children he saw in Palestine, he wrote: "I thought of their little brothers and sisters who had not been allowed to play in German streets, and it was good to see these free Jewish children. . . . I thought of the dark, sallow, unhappy Jewish children of Europe. I had seen pictures of their faces; their youthful frames had borne the features of old men and women, and now I saw these little ones who look like children again."

Soon after arriving in Washington, Norman learned that his parents had been killed in a Nazi concentration camp. At 28, he plunged to his death off a Massachusetts Avenue NW bridge.

Herzl was not a towering figure at the time of Norman's death, and, with no relatives, Norman was buried in the Adas Israel Cemetery without even a headstone. Two years later, synagogue members provided one, which stood in a corner of the cemetery yesterday, abutting a chain-link fence.