'Bringing him home is the right thing to do'

To bring the remains of Theodor Herzl's grandson to Jerusalem for reburial, Jerry Klinger has had to fight a long battle to explain what made a man he'd never met jump to his death 62 years ago.

Klinger, of Washington D.C., will have won the fight next week, when Stephen Norman Herzl is laid to rest next to his ancestors.

Before the grandson could be buried on Mount Herzl - the cemetery for Israel's national heroes, named after Zionism's spiritual father - Klinger had to prove the deceased was worthy of the venue. The fact that Norman took his own life by jumping off a Washington bridge didn't make the task any easier.

"I was always involved with Jewish history, so when I first read a short account of Stephen Norman Herzl's tragic end in 2002, it really grabbed my attention," Klinger said.

The article said Herzl's last descendant had jumped off a bridge on learning his parents had been murdered in the Holocaust. His mother, Trude Neumann, the youngest of Theodor Herzl's three children, died with her husband in the Nazi concentration camp Theresienstadt in what is now the Czech Republic.

It took Klinger, who heads the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation, five years to convince Israel's most prominent religious and political decision-makers to sanction the reburial. "He was the driving force behind this whole thing," the foreign ministry said of Klinger.

"At first no one would speak to me, but then I got through to Ehud Olmert when he was still a minister in Ariel Sharon's cabinet," Klinger said. "He said I would have to get the Sephardi chief rabbi's consent first. Rabbi Shlomo Amar asked me who this man was and why he did what he did."

To answer that question to Amar's satisfaction, Klinger commissioned a psychiatric evaluation by an expert witness, who gave an official opinion based on research that goes back three generations.

The official evaluation said Norman, who had been appointed a cultural attache to the British embassy in 1945, was an ill man. "He suffered from bouts of clinical depression, and it seized him when he learned of the terrible news. This was a man who loved too much. That's what made him do what he did," Klinger said.

But even after Amar gave his approval based on the report, the operation had to leap one last hurdle. Klinger told Anglo File that Olmert and Jewish Agency Chairman Ze'ev Bielski had asked him to put the operation on hold so as not to jeopardize efforts to bring the bodies of Herzl's two other children from France to Israel.

After Paulina and Hans Herzl, Trude's older siblings, were interred in Jerusalem in 2006, Klinger pressed ahead with the finishing touches for bringing home the last Herzl - and the only descendent who is reported to have taken an active interest in Zionism.

Norman's burial ceremony at Mount Herzl is scheduled to take place on December 5 before a very small crowd. "The U.S. delegation will be comprised of one middle-aged guy and his wife," Klinger said, referring to himself and his spouse. He added he would be flying with the body to Israel. "Bringing him home is the right thing to do," Klinger said.