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Friday September 5, 1997

Leaders at Basel set aside differences to vote for our future

Rebecca Kaplan Boroson

One hundred years ago, some 200 delegates from more than 20 countries gathered in Basel, Switzerland, to change our lives -- all of our lives.

Like any conglomeration of Jews, they may have differed on how best to do this, but one thing they knew: Jewry, scattered worldwide, often among enemies, was in danger and the Jewish future clouded. The delegates vowed to create, in the words of the Basel Program, "a home for the Jewish people in Palestine secured by public law."

The First Zionist Congress still lives in our imagination: The men, and a handful of non-voting women, in formal dress, for this, the founding of a state, is a most formal occasion. The 15 minutes of emotional applause and cheers in a dozen languages to greet Theodor Herzl, the man who had brought them there. Herzl himself, fighting opposition, struggling for support, at the cost of his health and, far too soon, his life. And the recounting of Jewish misery all over the world, but particularly in Eastern Europe.

At the close of the congress, as reported by a journalist in the London Jewish World, "The Congress was on its feet, the correspondents mounted the table, and the audience in the gallery grew equally excited. It was not a question of cheering, but of ventilating hearts full of emotion."

Back home in Vienna, Herzl wrote, in his now-famous diary statement, "Were I to sum up the Basel congress in a word -- which I shall carefully refrain from uttering in public -- it would be this: in Basel I founded the Jewish state.

"If I were to say this out loud today, everybody would laugh at me. In five years, perhaps, but certainly in 50, everybody will agree."

That was written Sept. 3, 1897. The state of Israel proclaimed its independence on May 14, 1948. Herzl's prediction -- we may well call it a prophecy -- was less than a year off.

But what if there had been no Basel congress? Or if there had, what if no agreement had been reached?

No Israel, then; no place of refuge for the remnants of Europe's Jews; no gathering of the exiles from Ethiopia, from Iraq, from the flotsam of the former Soviet Union; no literal and spiritual homeland. And, possibly, no Jews, in any meaningful sense.

Would that we could thank them, those men in their frock coats and top hats, who put aside their quarrels and qualms and voted for the Jewish future.

Would that we, from all our different corners of Jewish life, could emulate them.

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