Recently, several hundred people gathered at the Park East Synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side for a most befitting tribute to the life and legacy of famed Zionist leader and visionary Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky on the occasion of his 70th yahrzeit. Due to the geo-political realities of the age of terrorism, security was tight at the venue as attendees went through airport style checks as they entered.
Sponsored by the Americans For a Safe Israel organization which has enduring roots in the Jabotinsky movement, the evening began with an introduction by AFSI chairman Herbert Zweibon who spoke of his organization’s efforts towards educating future generations of Israeli youth about Jabotinsky’s life and prescient teachings.
“We are proud to say that his legacy has been incorporated into the high school curriculum,” Zweibon said.
Born in 1880 in Odessa, Russia, the young Jabotinsky studied law and served as a correspondent for several well-known Russian newspapers. His reports and articles were widely read and he soon became recognized as one of the brilliant exponents of Russian journalism. The fatal consequences for Jews during the Kishinev pogroms of 1903 served as a catalyst for his lifelong commitment to the Zionist movement. As a staunch advocate for Jewish self-defense, he worked with the British mandatory regime in establishing the Zion Mule Corps and the Jewish Legion.
Keenly aware of the fact that the creation of a Jewish State would only come to fruition through the dedication and tenacity of Jewish youth, Jabotinsky founded his Betar Zionist youth movement in 1923.
Renowned author and political commentator Rael Jean Isaac delivered the introductory remarks for Douglas J. Feith, the evening’s keynote speaker. “Doug Feith’s father was a member of the Jabotinsky youth movement, Betar in pre-World War II Europe, so it comes as no surprise that Doug has had a lifelong interest in Jabotinsky,” Isaac said.
“Few people are honored 70 years after their death,” Feith intoned. “Jabotinsky’s remarkable accomplishments and prescient ideas are still applicable today.”
Feith spoke of Jabotinsky’s career as a journalist, a poet, a proponent for the revivification of the Hebrew language and a tireless fighter for Jewish statehood.
During the dark days before the Holocaust, Jabotinsky posited himself in the forefront of a campaign for Jewish survival. It was in Warsaw in 1938 that he told his Jewish audience, “Liquidate the exile before the exile liquidates you.”
“Jabotinsky viewed the creation of a Jewish State as a matter of life and death. He was a man who combined erudition with action and as a result of his positions on Jewish resistance to subjugation and his campaign to form a Jewish army, he was unfairly smeared as a fascist.”
As the father of Revisionist Zionism, Jabotinsky’s political platform of maintaining the territorial integrity of the historical Land of Israel and the establishment of a Jewish State with a Jewish majority on both sides of the river Jordan was rejected by the Zionist Executive in 1935. They refused to state that “the aim of Zionism was the establishment of a Jewish State.” It was at this point that he resigned from the Zionist Organization and founded the New Zionist Organization (NZO) to conduct independent political activity for free immigration and the establishment of a Jewish State.
“Jabotinsky held a deep belief that we are all created in G-d’s image. He extolled the views of universal equality and individual liberty.”
Ze’ev Jabotinsky passed away in 1940. He was buried in New Montefiore cemetery in New York rather than in Israel, in accordance with the statement in his will: “I want to be buried outside Palestine, may not be transferred to Palestine unless by order of that country’s eventual Jewish government.”
Initially, after the State of Israel was established, Prime Minister David Ben Gurion did not make such a decision, but in 1964, shortly after becoming Prime Minister, Levi Eshkol ordered the reinternment of Jabotinsky and his wife in Jerusalem at the Mount Herzl cemetery. A monument to Jabotinsky remains at his original burial site in New York.
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Fern Sidman is an investigative journalist and writer whose articles have appeared in many Jewish publications.
