The Maccabaean

O BE a great idealist and the initiator of new ideas, a man must be wholly devoted to his task and not accessible to any thoughts outside of his chosen aim.

Should any other thought or idea enter the mind of such a man, it would mean a great distraction and make it impossible for him to achieve the end he had in sight.

Our celebration of the origin of the National Fund to-day calls forth of necessity before our eyes those great and prominent figures whose unselfish and steady devotion to the ideal they created, made the National Fund possible, and furthermore brought it to a point where it could maintain its place without any outside assistance. It was this one goal, plan and ambition of their lives, the National Fund, that filled their thoughts, made their hearts throb and took all they esteem as worth while in their intellectual existence.

The thought of a National Fund arose in the mind of Professor Schapiro, of Heidelberg. His contention was that if Jews of the whole world would start to prepare funds for a possible national disaster, which in his opinion could not be avoided in the long run, we should have a capital that would carry us through those stormy times and make our continued existence possible. Professor Schapiro came with his proposal to the first Congress at Basle, but though in principle all agreed with him, nothing was done to carry out the idea into practical effect.

ie an 3 5 Ve a eh Ve Br To one who had the good fortune to observe Professor Schapiro’s personality at the Congress, a curious spectacle was presented. A dreamy mathematician, with dry figures mixed with idealistic fancies, a man of figures and full of phantastic dreams of a happy future for our people, based on material grounds. He looked like a “contradictio in adjecto,’” a Russian veshivabochor transformed into a German professor. Such was the man who proposed a plan to establish a Jewish fund, to be the possession of our people and belong to it, exclusively, so that no one could touch it.

The practical effect of Schapiro’s proposal took quite a different shape then and became at the first Congress the Zionist “shekel.” These were the first days of the Zionist organization and much remained to be done to perfect it, ere there could be any talk of further development of

the National Fund. The Colonial Bank was the next step, and only at the Fifth Congress, four years after Prof. Schapiro's death, the idea was resumed. And it was then, at the Fifth Congress, that money was collected for the Fund, even before it was clear for what purpose the Fund was to be established.

It was then highly fortunate that the idea found a great leader in the person of Johann Meyer Kremenetzky who understood its practical significance and gave it a content which it would not have otherwise found, no matter how enthusiastically the idea was received on all sides.

Kremenetzky was another edition of Doctor Schapiro. A business-man an idealist, who would not give up a minute of rest if it was a question of business, but would give millions whenever it was the question of an ideal. A Russian Jew who by dint of undomitable energy found his way to Viennese society and became one of its most successful business-men, but who at the same time remained always a Russian Jew at heart, with a native trait for pure idealism.

He was so convinced of the value of the National Fund that it became for him the Alpha and Omega of Zionist thought. At a small assemblage of Zionist leaders in Vienna, in 1903, at which I was also present, these were his words concerning the National Fund: "The events of hundreds of years of national tradition kept our Jewish people in bonds of spiritual slavery. Outer forces worked on us to bend our necks, so that we really came to think of ourselves as bound to be as we were and that we could never raise ourselves to the dignity of human being. Our neighbors saw to it that we lived in a state of constant dread and fear, and created within our minds a peculiar kind of fear which I might call the "Golus"-fear, which caused that we became economically a dependent race and the liberty that was stolen away from us killed our natural desire for the joys of life."

"As long as there lay on us a dread of liberation," said Kremenetzky, "we could not naturally think of freedom. But such a condition cannot exist forever and a day must come when the enslaved people will begin to feel its strength. But to effect that liberation, we must first of all be able to stand on our own legs."