(By Judge Jdlian W. Hack THE restoration of Palestine as t...)
By Judge Jdlian W. Hack THE restoration of Palestine as the national homeland of the Jewish people Is rapidly approaching realization. For centuries, pious Jews have prayed for I t; for decades, Jewish pioneering coloniB ts have striven for I t; for the past twenty years, Jews everywhere have banded together in the Zionist Organization to achieve it. The impelling forces were diverse: the reU gious, racial, philanthropic, and economic predominated. But the rapid growth of the Zionist movement in recent years is due, perhaps, in largest measure to the added hope and beU ef that in a Palestine with an eventual Jewish majority, and therefore in a revived Jewish clvihzation, the social visions of the people of Israel would be translated Into law and practice: that the Jewish people chosen as ever for service, would thereby be enabled again to offer to the world an example of social Justice, the finest fruit of a nations creative power. The Pittsburgh Program represents in part this social view: the author of Social Zionism, as one of its makers. Is especially fitted to expound its principles, especially insofar as they relate to land and taxation. Julian W. Maok.
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The social commonwealth; a plan for achieving industrial democracy
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
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Bernard Abraham Rosenblatt was an American lawyer and Zionist leader, the national movement of the Jewish people.
Background
Bernard Abraham Rosenblatt was born in Grodek, Poland. He was the son of Louis Rosenblatt, a prosperous Bialystok woolen factory owner, and Mary Hachnochi, whose family had been woolen mill owners for more than a generation. The Rosenblatts' home attracted Jewish nationalists and intellectuals. The depression of 1890 prompted Louis Rosenblatt to visit a cousin in America in 1891. Two months after he reached Philadelphia, he sent for his wife and children, who arrived in 1892. The family settled in a large house on Philadelphia's South Side, near the center of the emerging immigrant Jewish neighborhood.
Education
Rosenblatt attended public school and Jewish religious school. In 1900 the family moved to Pittsburgh, where Rosenblatt attended Central High School. Later he entered Columbia College. In 1908, Rosenblatt completed an M. A. in sociology, and the following year, he received a law degree from Columbia University Law School.
Career
In his autobiography, Two Generations of Zionism (1967), Bernard recalled his first passionate pronouncement on Zionism at a lively Sabbath-afternoon discussion about the first Zionist Congress. He organized his first Zionist group in 1902, the Zion Literary Society, for high school students. In 1903 he attended his first American Zionist convention, in Pittsburgh. The steel strike that year spurred the Rosenblatts' move to New York City, where they lived in the Jewish neighborhood of Harlem in 1904. Rosenblatt by December 1904 had established the first Columbia University Zionist Society, despite the efforts of E. R. A. Seligman and Felix Adler, both professors at Columbia, to discourage him. In a bid to legitimate Zionism on campus, Rosenblatt competed during his senior year for the Curtis Medal. His prizewinning oration, "Palestine: The Future Hebrew State, " described the Zionist pioneers as Jewish Puritans laying the foundations for the Jewish state in cooperative agricultural colonies; it articulated themes that he later pursued as a Zionist leader.
In 1911 he went to Tannersville, N. Y. , to recuperate from an appendicitis attack. There he attended the Zionist convention as a delegate of the Collegiate Zionist League, which he had helped to organize. He agreed to serve as honorary secretary of the Federation of American Zionists, thus moving into the inner circle of the small American Zionist movement. At one of the weekly administrative meetings, he was delegated to assist a group of women to organize a Zionist society. His efforts helped establish the nucleus of Hadassah, the American women's Zionist organization.
In 1914, Rosenblatt published his first book, The Social Commonwealth, in which he combined socialist ideals of cooperation and the regulation of economic life with the benefits of competition and a voluntary democracy. He focused on agricultural labor as a solution to mass unemployment and on the nationalization of land to protect the public as consumers. He consistently tried to implement the latter in Palestine. In 1915 he incorporated the American Zion Commonwealth to purchase land in Palestine for Jewish settlement. The organization adopted his land policy by reserving 10 percent of all lands for communal purposes, including industrial development, and spreading the profit from renting these urban lands throughout the community.
Rosenblatt made a brief, unsuccessful foray into American politics in 1916 as the Democratic candidate in Harlem's Twentieth Congressional District against Morris Hillquit, a Socialist, and Isaac Siegel, the Republican incumbent. The fiercely contested race attracted attention, with Rosenblatt running as the Jewish nationalist candidate who championed President Woodrow Wilson's progressive domestic program. At the American Zionists' 1918 Pittsburgh convention, Rosenblatt helped draft the two platform articles that advocated the public ownership of land in Palestine. He introduced to the American Jewish Congress platform his concept of a Jewish commonwealth modeled upon the commonwealths of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania but "Hebraic in character and culture. " He saw this idea as an American contribution to Zionism. American Jews, however, did not support a Jewish commonwealth until 1942.
In 1919, at Louis Brandeis' behest, Rosenblatt traveled to Versailles to urge Felix Frankfurter, the American Zionist representative at the peace conference, to adopt his land-ownership program. But the British refused to incorporate the program into their Palestine mandate. In 1920, Rosenblatt attended the first World Zionist Convention since World War I and fell under the spell of Chaim Weizmann's oratory. He agreed to champion the Keren Hayesod, or Foundation Fund, in the United States. In 1921, Rosenblatt received a judicial appointment to the New York City Magistrate's Court. He rallied behind the Weizmann group, against the prominent American Zionist leaders identified with Brandeis. Rosenblatt, an exceptionally persuasive speaker who supported Weizmann's program of colonization in Palestine, rather than Brandeis' plan of controlled capitalist development, sounded the opening salvos against Stephen Wise at the bitter Cleveland Zionist convention in 1921. The Brandeis group walked out, leaving the leadership to Rosenblatt and his colleagues. Rosenblatt was elected the first American delegate to the World Zionist Executive.
Returning to America in 1922 from the Executive's Jerusalem meeting, he successfully floated the first Jewish municipal bond issue. Rosenblatt's family's first visit to Palestine in 1925 led his wife to decide to settle in Haifa. For the next thirty years, he divided his time between Haifa and New York City, where he maintained his law practice and home. During the 1920's he acted as mediator between two factions of American Zionism. He also invested in a large number of business enterprises in Palestine, reflecting his belief in the importance of the migration of capital, and oversaw major land purchases, including those leading to the establishment of Herzlia, the industrial region of Haifa Bay, and several agricultural colonies.
He served as director of the Israel Land Development Company, the Migdal Insurance Company, and Tiberias Hot Springs. In the late 1930's, when the British were considering partitioning Palestine, Rosenblatt organized a Haifa committee to advocate partition and federation, adopting the American federal model.
He spent the war years in New York engaged in Democratic and Jewish politics. He wrote widely on his vision of a Jewish commonwealth, federated with an Arab one, in Palestine. After the war he returned to Haifa and, as an American citizen, challenged the British ban on land sales in the courts. The issue, however, became academic when the United Nations voted for partition in 1947. The establishment of the state of Israel, the central dream of Rosenblatt's life, brought to an end his Zionist activity. His vision of a social Zionism guiding a Jewish commonwealth reflected an American perspective that few Israeli leaders understood. After his wife's death in 1955, he returned to New York City, where he died.
Achievements
Rosenblatt was remembered as founder and first president of the American Zion Commonwealth (1915). It was the land development company dedicated to facilitating Jewish settlement in Palestine. He coordinated the land acquisitions for, and further establishment of, the towns of Herzliyyah, Afulah, Balfouria, and settlement in the Haifa Bay region.
(By Judge Jdlian W. Hack THE restoration of Palestine as t...)
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Connections
At the meetings of the American women's Zionist organization Bernard Abraham met Gertrude Goldsmith, who became a fervent Zionist after attending the World Zionist Congress in 1911 as the American delegate and was one of the principal organizers of Hadassah. On June 3, 1914, they married. They had two children.
