Zionism

Like many Jewish communities, Hartford's Jews were concerned with the conditions facing their co-religionists worldwide. They supported many causes dedicated to relieving this suffering and immediately rallied behind Theodor Herzl, whose book The Jewish State [Der Judenstaat], written in 1894, called for the creation of an internationally recognized and guaranteed home for the Jewish people in Palestine. Herzl, a jounalist, was shocked by the virulent anti-Semitism he witnessed during the Dreyfus trial in France, and the book expressed his view that the only long-term and permanent solution to anti-Semitism was a Jewish homeland.

After 1897, when the first Jewish Congress met in Basel, Switzerland, the Zionist movement began to take shape in America. In Hartford that year, a handful of enthusiastic and far-seeing Jews organized the B'nai Zion Society, and this organization soon became one of the staunch pillars of the Zionist movement in this country.

In the course of the development of the Zionist movement, many national and international Zionist figures visited and addressed public meetings in Hartford. Among them were Dr. Shemaryahu Levin, a member of the former Russian Duma ( parliament ) who, when it was dissolved in 1905, had been forced to leave his native land; Naftali Imber, composer of the "Hatikvah," the national anthem of Israel; the renowned author and humorist, Sholom Aleichem; the Hebrew writer, Reuben Brainin; Hayim Nahman Bialik, the national Hebrew poet; Nahum Sokolow, noted scholar and linguist, and former president of the World Zionist Congress; Ittamar Ben Avi, Hebrew journalist; Rabbi Meyer Berlin ( Bar Ilan), leader of World Mizrachi; Louis Lipsky, renowned Zionist leader; Professor Israel Friedlaender of the Jewish Theological Seminary; Dr. Judah Magnes, later president of the Hebrew University; Professor Horace M. Kallen; Hirsch Masliansky, prominent Yiddish orator; Joseph Barondess, labor leader; Abe Goldberg, Yiddish journalist; Justice Louis D. Brandeis; Rabbi Stephen S. Wise; Zev Jabotinsky, revisionist leader; Henrietta Szold, founder of Hadassah; Golda Meyerson ( Meir ), founder of the Pioneer Women; Emanuel Neuman, Zionist leader; Dr. Nahum Goldman, president of the World Jewish Congress; and Professor Albert Einstein. Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Congress, and later first president of the State of Israel, frequently visited Hartford.

During the Nazi regime, Hartford's Zionist committees frequently went to Washington to plead with the State Department and members of Congress to persuade the British Mandate authority to open the doors of Palestine to Jewish victims of the Nazis. A few years later on May 14,1948, Hartford Jews, along with Zionists throughout the world, rejoiced when the State of Israel was declared by the provisional government in Palestine and immediately recognized by U.S. President Harry Truman.