Abraham Salt

Abraham Salt (1930)

Abraham Adolph Salz (* around 1864 in Tarnow ; † around 1941) was a Galician Zionist , lawyer and initially leader of the Chowewe Zion .

Life

He studied law in Vienna until 1887 and then practiced as a lawyer in Tarnow, then Austria-Galician. He also wrote articles for the Lviv Young Zionist Polish weekly Przyszlosc ("Future"), of which he was a co-founder.

From 1884 he was active in the Kadimah (student union) . He was a participant in the first Zionist Congress and a member of the Grand Committee of Action.

He was a supporter of small colonization (and as such gradually came into conflict with Herzl ), supported the "Rebbe" of Czortkow in promoting his national Jewish ideas and plans for Palestine colonization .

Salt was vice-president of the Tarnow association "Ahavat Zion" founded in 1891 and supported Nathan Birnbaum's preparatory work for the creation of the association "Zion" from Galicia in 1892/1893 .

What remains largely unknown is that prior to the first Zionist Congress in 1897, before Herzl entered the world history stage, similar plans fizzled out. For example, from September 3 to September 5, 1893, a preliminary conference to convene a General Zionist Congress in Berlin took place in Vienna , the main work on this being done by Mordechai Ehrenpreis ; Nathan Birnbaum waited and refused to announce the congress plan in self-emancipation . In the "Conference Commission" were Bamboo , Ehrenpreis and L. Estermann (the board of directors of the Young Israel Association ). The pre-conference, which then took place in Birnbaum's apartment in Vienna, Miesbachgasse 12, was attended by: Ehrenpreis, Zwi Belkowsky , Brainin and Salz. The project had no effect, found no support and was not even mentioned in the (relevant) press, so it was not followed up. Birnbaum, who could have taken over the management, did not do it, but threw himself on the work for the association "Zion". He wanted to enforce the priority of "agitation" over practical colonization work, the followers of which he now regularly calls " Philistines ".

Abraham Salz was also the first party leader of the Galician Jewish Nationalists. In 1899 he founded the Machanajim settlement in Galil. He had obtained Herzl's approval for this (Salz had bought 10,000 dunams of land from Edmond Rothschild in Paris in 1897 without prior consultation , which contradicted the clear resolution of the Congress); ten years later the settlement had to be abandoned.

At the 8th Congress in August 1907 (The Hague, Chaim Weizmann brings the proposal of Synthetic Zionism for the first time ) he was re-elected to the Great Action Committee. In 1907 (in Stryj ) and 1911 (in several constituencies) he ran unsuccessfully for the Reichsrat . At the beginning of 1897, Herzl had already considered electing him - together with Leon Kellner - to the Reichsrat and having him propagate Zionism there. Once it was realized that it would not penetrate, the project was dropped again.

Works

• Memoirs (Polish) 1934

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• Theodor Herzl, letters and diaries , 7 volumes, ed. by Alex Bein , Hermann Greive , Moshe Schaerf, Julius H. Schoeps , Johannes Wachten, Berlin / Frankfurt a. M./Wien 1983–1996 (passim)
• Central Zionist Archives (CZA) Jerusalem, file A2 / 86