The Zionist Story Began Long Before Basel

It also cites Rabbi Yitzchak Elchanan Spektor, who welcomed the Katowice Conference and later wrote that settling the Land of Israel is a great mitzvah and rejoiced that the movement had awakened across the Jewish people. The article says the Katowice Conference took place 13 years before Basel, Mikveh Israel 27 years earlier, Petah Tikva 19 years earlier, Jerusalem’s neighborhoods outside the walls 36 years earlier, the Vilna Gaon’s disciples’ agricultural work in Safed and Tiberias about 80 years earlier, and the Hasidic arrivals in the Galilee 120 years before the word “Zionism” was coined. It ends by asking what modern Jews owe the pioneers, and says the story did not begin with the Zionist Congress and will not end with it.