The grandparents of Zionist visionary Theodore Herzl, Simon Leib and Rivka Herzl, are to be buried today in a state ceremony in Jerusalem on the mountain that bears their family name. This touching Zionist moment par excellence takes place a week after Simon and Rivka’s bodies were exhumed from their resting place in the cemetery of Zemun, which is today a suburb within metropolitan Belgrade – the capital of Serbia. Surprisingly, the potentially sensitive issue of raising the dead in a foreign land to bring them to Israel seems to not have raised an ounce of protest from the Serbian national authorities or the local Jewish community.

As with Sherlock Holmes, the fact that the dog did not bark in this case, speaks volumes about the ongoing development at the highest levels of international relations between Israel, Serbia and their, sometimes loud and sometimes silent partner, the United States. It also perhaps inadvertently reveals something about Jewish identity in the communities of the former Yugoslavia today, survivors of not only the Holocaust, which ravaged the region, but also the remnants of the internecine warfare that tore apart a once reasonably powerful and respected country.

The Serbian town of Zemun has an equal (if not greater claim) to being the birthplace of modern Zionism as compared with Vienna, Budapest or any other great European Jewish  cultural center. It was the home for over 40 years of Rabbi Yehudah Hai Alkalai, who actively promoted his ideas for the non-messianic revival of the Jewish State from what at the time was an outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His ideas to form what became the World Zionist Congress and the Jewish National Fund can be traced to Theodore Herzl via his grandfather Simon Leib who lived in Zemun at the same time as Rabbi Alkalai and even blew the shofar in his synagogue. It is known that the young Theodore was close with his grandfather and even journeyed from Budapest to visit him in Zemun in the summers as a youth.

Unfortunately, not much remains of the old Jewish Zemun. Most of it was destroyed during World War II and the Holocaust. The decimation of the community meant that the one surviving synagogue, located at 5 Rabina Alkalaja street, was rented........

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