Herzl grandchild to be buried in Israel

The remains of the only grandchild of Zionist pioneer Theodor Herzl will be brought to Israel from the United States for reburial next month, a Jewish Agency official said Tuesday.

Stephan Theodor Norman was buried in the Adas Israel Congregation's cemetery in Washington in 1946.

Washington health authorities agreed to Norman's disinterment, said Michael Jankelowitz, a spokesman for the Jewish Agency, a quasi-governmental body that was involved in the project.

Rabbi Jeffrey Wohlberg of Adas Israel said it was only natural to rebury Norman's remains in Jerusalem.

"We agreed to it because the Israeli government brought Herzl's other children's remains to Israel and reburied them at Mount Herzl," he told The Associated Press by telephone, "and we thought that it would be appropriate that he be buried with the rest of the family."

Herzl, a European journalist and author, was deeply affected by the Dreyfus Affair in 1895, when a Jewish military officer in France was wrongly convicted of espionage. Herzl felt the scandal was driven by virulent anti-Semitism and decided that Jews needed their own nation.

The following year, Herzl published his seminal work, "The Jewish State." He later founded the World Zionist Organization, which spearheaded Israel's establishment.

Norman was active in the movement before the founding of Israel in 1949, reading about his grandfather's work when he was sent to England just before World War II.

Norman served as an officer in the British army during the war, changing his name from Neumann to avoid anti-Semitism, according to a history of the Adas Israel congregation. His mother, Trude, was Herzl's youngest child.

She perished at age 50 at the Terezein concentration camp in what was then Czechoslovakia. Unable to handle news of the deaths of his relatives at the hands of the Nazis, Norman committed suicide by jumping off a Washington bridge.

Theodor Herzl, who died in 1904 at age 44, was buried in Vienna, but specified in his will that he wanted his body and those of his close relatives moved to the Jewish state he hoped would be created.

In 1949, a year after Israel's independence, Herzl's body was brought to Jerusalem and buried in the Mount Herzl Cemetery, which later became the final resting place of Israel's leaders and war heroes. The bodies of his parents, two of his children, and his sister were brought later.