Fifty Years of Hovevei Zion Commemorated in Birth-town Bialystock: Gathering of Survivors at Grave O

The fiftieth anniversary of the Hovevei Zion movement which preceded the Zionist Organisation founded at the First Zionist Congress in Basle in 1897, was observed to-day in Bialystock, where the movement started, the commemoration centring round the figure of Rabbi Samuel Mohilever, one of the founders and leaders of the Hovevei Zion, who was the Rabbi of Bialystock, where he died in 1898 and is buried.

A group of survivors of the Hovevei Zion movement, among them Rabbi Isaac Nisenbaum, who was Rabbi Samuel Mohilever’s secretary, ex-Senator Rabbi Rubinstein, Chief Rabbi of Villna, Mr. Zvi Prilutzki, Dr. Z. Bychowski, Mr. L. Levin-Epstein and Dr. M. Feldste in came to Bialystock for the occasion, and Deputy Isaac Gruenbaum, Dr. Mayer Klumel, and Dr. Davidsohn headed the members of the Central Committee of the Polish Zionist Federation.

A special service was held in the Beth Samuel Synagogue, which is named in memory of Rabbi Samuel Mohilever. The members of the Zionist Organisation in Bialystock and the pupils of the Hebrew High School and the Jewish People’s Schools in the town, together with the visitors then went in procession to the cemetery to the grave of Rabbi Samuel Mohilever, where speeches were delivered by Rabbi Nisenbaum and Dr. Klumel.

A memorial tablet has been unveiled bearing an inscription recording that the Hivat Zion movement was founded in Bialystock 50 years ago.

It has been decided to commemorate the anniversary by raising a fund for the Jewish National Fund to establish two colonies in Palestine, which will be named Hivat Zion and Bilu, the latter in honour of the first settlers belonging to the Bilu group who came to Palestine in 1882.

It was in 1875, on the occasion of the celebration of the 90th. birthday of Sir Moses Montefiore, that Rabbi Samuel Mohilever openly declared himself an adherent of the colonisation of Palestine. After the great persecution of the Jews in Russia in 1881, he accompanied the refugees to Lemberg and proposed to the Emigration Committee there that they should be sent to Palestine. Soon after he founded the first Hovevei Zion Society, and for some years after he undertook frequent journeys to Western Europe to win adherents for the movement. He succeeded in obtaining the support of Baron Edmond de Rothschild, who commissioned him to select a number of Jewish families in Russia to go out to Palestine as colonists. The colonies of Ekron and Rishon-le-Zion were thus founded. The Kvuza “Gan Shmuel” (Garden of Samuel) in Palestine is named after him. Rabbi Samuel Mohilever was in Palestine in 1890, and with the aid of some wealthy Russian Zionists he bought 1,556 acres of land near Jaffa and founded the colony of Rehoboth.

When he heard in 1891 that Baron de Hirsch intended founding Jewish colonies in the Argentine, he went to see him in Paris to urge him to choose Palestine instead of the Argentine as the country of Jewish colonisation, but he was not successful.

When the political Zionist movement was founded by Herzl, Rabbi Mohilever became an adherent of Herzl, and intended to take part in the First Zionist Congress in Basle as the leader of the Russian Zionists. He fell ill, however, and was unable to undertake the journey and sent a letter of greeting. The day before his death he wrote a letter to all friends of Zion recommending the foundation of the Jewish Colonial Trust and the colonisation of Palestine.

Rabbi Samuel Mohilever’s son, Rabbi Joseph Mohilever, also a Zionist, succeeded him as Rabbi of Bialystock in 1902.

Fifty years ago, in pre-Zionist Organisation times, began the Hovevei Zion, a movement to return to the land, the Jewish National Fund said in its Rosh Hashanah message to its supporters issued last September. In the same year the first Bilu group arrived in Eretz Israel. This year, too, it went on, we celebrate the completion of 30 years of the Jewish National Fund. These two anniversaries mark epochs in Jewish life, and the Jewish National Fund the world over will celebrate these anniversaries in fitting fashion.

At the end of October, the survivors of the Bilu settlers in Palestine issued an appeal urging support of the Jewish National Fund as the most appropriate way of celebrating the 50th. anniversary of the Hivath Zion movement, and in this connection the Jewish National Fund headquarters in Jerusalem announced a few days later that it had decided that its next full-size settlement to be established in Palestine will be named Hivath Zion in honour of the anniversary.