Dr. Kokesch of Vienna.
ONE by one officers of the Zionist Guard fall by the way. On Saturday, Oct. 21st, Dr. Oser Kokesch died in Vienna, in the 45th year of his age. He was one of the men who helped to make the Zionist movement. Born in Brody he saw Jewish assaults in his youth. The impression remained with him for life. He attended the University of Vienna, became a lawyer of high standing in the city, remained unmarried and devoted his whole life to the Jewish people.
It is difficult for the non-Zionist, and even for the rank and file of the Zionists, to realize the manner of the men who made the most modern page of Jewish history. Oser Kokesch, as the writer knew him, was a simple soul with none of the peculiarities of the lewyer either in conversation or action. He entered Vienna at the height of the assimilation period, but unlike most Galicians remained unmoved by the current thought. He stood at the cradle of the Palestinian Colonization movement in Austria and watched its development into the political movement. The cafe in which the students met was his home and the enthusiasts his family. He was one of the first men to whom Herzl came with his state idea and he bore much of the brunt of the work. He assisted in the organizing of the first Congress, but breaking his leg a few days prior to the opening session, was prevented from attending. He was, however, elected treasurer of the movement and held that office until the beginning of this year when his health gave way.
As an executive officer he worked day and night in the Zionist bureau, giving his legal knowledge and experience gratis to the cause. Tall, well built, with a smile for every emergency, smoking a cigar from a long paper tube such as the Viennese use.
he plodded on through his tasks, which were by no means confined to the treasuryship. A certain sardonic humor went together with brevity of speech. He was never voluble, and his greatest eloquence was the tears he shed in the committee room behind the Congress platform in Basle in 1903, when Herzl, whom he literally worshipped, was pressin.g him to vote for the East African commission. He was oppressed by a sense of coming fatality to the movement if the new policy were adopted and begged and entreated that there should be no departure from the Palestinian policy to which he had been wedded since his entrance to the Chovevi movement.
Herzl's death affected him deeply and he was a broken man at the conference called in Aug., 1904, to decide upon the new policy. He was then suffering from what were presumed to be stomach troubles, and was the butt of an anti-Viennese party which had been formed, and had from their point of view committed the unpardonable offense of sitting in Herzl's chair when he convened the members of the executive on the day of the leader's funeral. No thought of leadership, however, was in his mind, and still less of slighting the memory of the man of whom he would only speak in trembling accents. Later in the year illness compelled his retirement and cancer was the cause of death which came rather suddenly.
Oser Kokesch was amongst the ever dwindling few who literally and actually devoted all their mature life, time, money and capacity to the Jewish people. He probably has, like his leader, died poor in worldly possessions; but the crowd at his funeral is some proof that he lived rich in possessing the admiration of thousands for his simple and quixotic struggle to right the wrongs of Israel.