Second Most Important

"When I remember thee in time to come, O Jerusalem, it will not be with delight...The dreary deposits of 2,000 years filled with inhumanity, intolerance and filth lie in your evil-smelling alleys."

Thus spoke the founder of modern Zionism, the bearded Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl, some years before he was buried at Vienna's Doeblinger Friedhof in 1904. Last week, the body of Theodor Herzl was given a ceremonial reburial in the city that he had remembered without delight.

In his will he had written: "I want a modest funeral, without speeches and without flowers..." The nation he had inspired planned it differently. The plane from Vienna bearing Herzl's body was met at the Lydda airport by an honor guard of Israeli soldiers, sailors and air force men holding aloft gleaming, unsheathed sabers. The metal coffin, encased in a wooden box and covered with a prayer shawl, was placed on a black bier and carried to a catafalque on the Mediterranean Promenade of Tel Aviv. At dawn a 300-car cortege followed the coffin to a hill outside Jerusalem which had been renamed the Givat Herzl (Herzl's Hill). In groups of ten, farmers, workers, businessmen, old settlers and new immigrants slowly walked by and emptied bags of earth into the grave. A rabbi read the Kaddish (prayer for the dead). Drums sounded. Then the great crowd, estimated at 100,000, sang Hatikvah, the Zionist anthem.

It was, said Israel's Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, the second most important return of a dead hero in Jewish history; the most important, said Ben-Gurion, occurred 3,300 years ago when the Jews carried Joseph's casket back to Palestine from their Egyptian exile. But after the ceremony was over, most Israelis seemed too busy building their new country to be emotional about the prophet's return. The attitude of brisk irreverence was expressed by one Tel Aviv paper which ran a cartoon showing a man kneeling before Herzl's coffin. "Why do you weep?" a friend asks him. "This is a day of rejoicing." "I am not weeping," answers the man with the bowed head. "I am looking for my glasses."

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