The last wish of the father of modern Zionism was granted today when two of Theodore Herzl's children were laid to rest at his side in a Jerusalem cemetery bearing his name.
Hans and Paulina Herzl died in 1930 and were interred in a Jewish graveyard in France. The circumstances of their deaths and the way they lived their lives had triggered resistance to their burial in Israel.
"Now, having brought the remains of Paulina and Hans, we are completing the mission and closing a historic circle," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said at Mount Herzl, where their Israeli flag-draped coffins were buried on live national television.
Hans Herzl converted to Christianity and killed himself at the age of 39 soon after learning of his sister's death, apparently from a drug overdose that raised suspicions she had taken her own life.
She was 40 when she died. Theodore Herzl, a Hungarian-born Jew, founded the Zionist movement in 1897. He died in 1904 and his remains were transferred to Israel in 1949, a year after the Jewish state was founded.
Herzl had requested in his will that he and his family be buried in a future Jewish homeland. His parents and sister are interred near him on Mount Herzl.
Orthodox Jewish law prohibits the burial of suicides and non-Jews in Jewish cemeteries, and Israeli authorities made little effort in the early days of the state to track down the graves of Hans and Paulina, viewing their lifestyles as contradicting Zionist ideals.
The discovery by an Israeli historian in 2000 that the siblings' remains were in a cemetery in France led to renewed interest in bringing them to the Jewish homeland their father had envisioned.
Israeli rabbis recently ruled that Hans had returned to the Jewish fold before he killed himself, and they attributed his sister's death to mental illness, clearing the way under ritual law for today's burial.
The Israeli government approved the move in August following approval by the chief rabbi. But not all Israelis agreed. Rabbi Yisrael Eichler, a member of parliament from the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party, said in a radio interview the burial represented a "declaration of war on Jewish ideals". Herzl's third child, his daughter Trude, was killed in a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust.
Mr Olmert said she was apparently buried in a mass grave in what is now the Czech Republic