For 57 years Israel kept the children of Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, at arms length.
A year after its independence, in August 1949, the government brought over Herzl's remains from Vienna along with those of his father, mother, and sister. His late wife was cremated and the ashes were apparently lost. His youngest daughter died at the Theresienstdat Nazi concentration camp and was probably buried there.
But there were two other children, Paulina and Hans. In his will he asked that his closest relatives be buried near him, "By such time as my coffin is taken to the Land of Israel."
Paulina and Hans were buried in a corner of the Jewish cemetery in Bordeaux, in southwestern France. Israel treated them as through they were embarrassing relatives who are better forgotten.
Wednesday, however, it came to grips with their sad story and in a state funeral interred them close to their father on a Jerusalem hilltop named after him.
Theodore Herzl, a disillusioned assimilationist Jew, founded the Zionist movement in 1897. Until his death in 1904, at the age of 44, he devoted his energies to creating a Jewish state.
"He was not a very good father nor a very good husband," said Yitzhak Conforti of Bar Ilan University's Department of Jewish History. Herzl did not have much time for them, his wife was hospitalized with mental problems, and in his will he noted that he had spent all the family's savings on furthering his Zionist dreams.
Paulina, his daughter, was 14 years old and Hans was 13 when he died. They were poor. Paulina eventually became a sick, homeless woman, a mental case, who reached Bordeaux in 1930. None of the Jews there opened their door to her, said Ariel Feldstein, a professor of history at the Sapir College who studied the family's history.
Police arrested her for vagrancy. Hans came from England to release her, returned to England, she was hospitalized and died from an overdose of morphine.
The brother returned to Bordeaux, and guilt ridden that he had failed her, committed suicide.
He had converted to Christianity, so the Jews rejected him.
Paulina and Hans were buried side by side in Bordeaux in September 1930 and the Zionists ignored them.
The establishment, "Did not want to bring the children because they did not want to spoil the myth surrounding Herzl," said Feldstein. They discussed the matter in 1949 and in the mid-1950s, placed the material in envelopes marked "Top Secret," and put them away, he related.
Mount Herzl became a national pantheon. A big black tombstone bearing only Theodore Herzl's family name was a powerful way of saying no further identification is needed. Presidents and prime ministers are buried there, a military cemetery including memorials for missing soldiers is to its north, and the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial is to its west.
Half hearted attempts to fulfill Herzl's will and bring Paulina and Hans' remains were blocked. In 1955 three rabbis, including Jerusalem's chief rabbi, ruled against bringing Hans' remains because he had converted and committed suicide, Feldstein said.
The situation changed in recent months after Feldstein researched the family's history. Sepharadi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar determined that Hans was Jewish even though he had sinned and committed suicide and that he can be accorded a regular Jewish burial.
Government and World Zionist Organization officials flew to France and returned with Paulina's and Hans' remains for the official ceremony held Wednesday with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Knesset speaker Dalia Itzik, opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu, and navy and police generals who laid wreaths.
Conforti said that the reburial reflected Israelis', "Return to Zionism, a search for the classic Zionism." He suggested that it indicates the disappearance of a post-Zionist fad when people claimed that the Zionist movement achieved its goals and a new era has begun.
People are now looking for leaders who are fully devoted to society and the nation, he said.
Hebrew University political science professor Shlomo Avineri criticized the ceremony. "Israel doesn't exist in order to be a burial [ground] for Jews," he told United Press International.
Millions of Jews are buried in Europe and bringing Herzl's children's remains has no symbolic significance. There is no royal dynasty here, Avineri said.
"Those poor children were really miserable, a bit confused, Hans called upon all the Jews to accept Christianity, [so] what can you do but pity them? ... Each of them is a tragic story, but what does this have to do with the national pantheon?"
Feldstein maintained that Olmert's decision to bring the two was "a courageous step" that showed that he realized the historic significance of Herzl's will to be "With my family in the Land of Israel."
"Now, with the burial of Paulina and Hans' remains, we complete the mission, and close a historic circle," Olmert declared.
Herzl's children buried in Israel
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