MONT HERZL
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Not far from Yad Vashem, Mount Herzl bears the name of the father of Zionism. This wooded hill is home to a museum that retraces the life of Theodore Herzl through a lively tour of several rooms, as well as a military cemetery and the graves of the great figures behind the State of Israel. Only access to the museum is subject to a charge, while the rest of Mount Herzl offers a pleasant walk.
The Herzl Museum presents the key moments in the evolution of Theodore Herzl's Zionist thought. It all began in 1894, in a café in Herzl's native Vienna. Then in Paris, during the Dreyfus trial, which the Neue Freie Presse newspaper sent him to cover. It was after this stay in France that Herzl wrote The Jewish State (1896). We then take a seat among the Jewish delegates to the first Zionist Congress in Basel from August 29 to 31, 1897, presided over by Herzl, before arriving in the reconstituted office and library of his Viennese home.
Theodore Herzl's tomb is set apart from his relatives and the other great figures of Zionism and the Hebrew state, including Vladimir Jabotinsky, David Wolffson, and all Israel's prime ministers: Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin... Only the first of these is absent: David Ben Gourion preferred to be buried in "his" kibbutz of Sde Boker, in the Negev desert.
A path links Yad Vashem, a short distance that connects its two decisive moments in Jewish history: the tragedy of the Holocaust and the creation of the Jewish state.
