A Family Reunion for Grandson of Zionism's Founder
Rockville History Buff Lobbied to Have Man's Remains Sent to Israel

By Michelle Boorstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 30, 2007

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 The resolution was rescinded in 1991, but advocates of Israel worry that the stigma will never disappear.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.

A tiny crew attended the disinterment, including Klinger, in a black velvet yarmulke, three morticians, an Israeli journalist, a cemetery employee operating a backhoe and Carrie Devorah, a photojournalist who has been helping Klinger with his campaign.

"His grandfather is what anchors us [Jews] in the world," Devorah said, gesturing to a metal box in which the morticians were placing Norman's bone fragments and wood from the disintegrated coffin they had found in the mud. "When people say, 'Go home,' we have a place to go. Before, we had nowhere to go."

Historians and others still sift through Herzl's writings and see many legacies. They note that he envisioned a Jewish state where people spoke not Hebrew, but German; that he and other early Zionists failed to understand Arab nationalism; and that in a utopian novel Herzl wrote, he describes a binational, egalitarian state.

"It's complex, not simple," said S. Ilan Troen, an Israeli studies professor at Brandeis University. "You could say, 'Who is your Herzl?' And you get different answers."

Despite Herzl's prominence, getting Norman exhumed and moved to Jerusalem was not easy. American Jewish and Israeli leaders weren't convinced of his prominence, and they were focused for several years on getting Herzl's two children moved from their graves in France (the remains of a third, Norman's mother, were never found) to Israel, a request Herzl made before he died. Jewish law also forbids suicide and the burying of people who commit suicide in Jewish cemeteries. Klinger had to commission research at the behest of Israel's chief rabbi to prove that Norman was ill, a distinction that has gained acceptance, but not among some Orthodox rabbis.

To achieve his goal, Klinger needed various approvals, including those of Adas Israel (which owns the cemetery) and the D.C. Department of Health. At Klinger's request, the Israeli Embassy signed the request to the city.

Klinger, an investment adviser, was advocating from a position of relative obscurity. He wasn't a relative of Herzl and wasn't joined by any of the large U.S. Jewish organizations. He petitioned the Israeli government through the small group he runs, the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation.

"It wasn't sort of an obvious thing. Herzl didn't actually know [Norman]; it was a longer shot," said Jacob Dellal, spokesman for the Jewish Agency-World Zionist Organization, which represented Jews before the founding of the state. The group still shares jurisdiction over some state entities, including Mount Herzl.

Until Norman is buried in Israel, he is being handled as though he had just died. His remains were driven in a hearse yesterday to a Rockville funeral home, where a shomer, or guard, is reading psalms beside him, as is customary for the Jewish dead. At 10 a.m. Monday, there will be a funeral service for him at Adas Israel, in Northwest Washington. And then he will head to Israel.