June 25, 2008

“If you will it, it is no dream,” Theodor (Binyamin Ze’ev) Herzl (1860-1904).

Who was the man behind this famous quote? Why should anyone be interested in him today? What does Zionism mean today? The Herzl Museum, which opened in 2005 on Mt. Herzl in Jerusalem, strives to help the public address these questions.

A visit to the museum is a multisensory experience. The tour presents the father of Zionism by guiding visitors through four rooms, each of which focuses on a different period in Herzl’s life, particularly the last nine years when he did most of his work. In each room, visitors view part of an amusing, attention-grabbing film in which the directors of a play about Herzl educate their young leading man, who knows nothing about the character he is to portray other than, “beard, balcony, and ‘if you will it, it is no dream.’”

Upon entering the museum, visitors walk down a recreation of the late nineteenth-century Viennese street where Herzl lived – complete with sounds of horses neighing, an oldfashioned streetlight, and cobblestones – into the first room, which contains the desk where he wrote the pamphlet The Jewish Statewhich has since been translated into 20 languages. Another room contains Herzl’s belongings, mainly the contents of his study. Another door leads to the recreation of the magnificent municipal hall in Basel where the First Zionist Congress, as well as several of the others, took place. Visitors are invited to take a seat among life-sized statues of the participants. Dr. Motti Friedman, director of the Herzl Museum and Educational Center, describes himself as a “hasid” of Herzl.

“He’s my hero from childhood,” he says, explaining that he is inspired by the challenges Herzl faced and how “he fought [for] his way and succeeded by changing the world.”

Friedman, whose office is filled with books, posters, cartoons, and figurines of Herzl, explains that the previous museum was old-fashioned and did not

The museum’s real challenge, Friedman believes is, “to [get people to] understand what magnitude this person had, a leader of a caliber we don’t see today. He saw what the situation was like, chose the route to the solution, and then fought the entire world to make it happen. [He did all this] in only nine years, a real giant. We try to help people to understand … the personality he had to be to … create the Zionist movement and persuade the Jews that they are a nation and they deserve territory.”

The finale of a visit is also the finale of the play that the directors were rehearsing. “Herzl” comes out and talks about his book on his vision of the Jewish state, Altneuland, and compares it to reality in the State of Israel today. He encourages today’s Israeli society, saying that although there are problems, there also is a thriving economy and flourishing culture. Although it is not Herzl’s vision of a European culture, Israeli culture is a special mixture of East and West, a nation and culture of our own. “Stop for a moment and discover that you are in the midst of a miracle,” Herzl says, “one created with our own hands and one still evolving. I wrote a book and you created a state.” He also reassures his audience, “Not everything was and will be an overnight success, but there is always hope…. If you will it, it is no dream.”

Friedman explains that he chose to “carry the torch” and teach the public about Herzl because Herzl’s ultimate goal was not only to create a Jewish state, but also to create a modern society in which values such as equality prevailed.