Rabin Alkalaj | Origin of Street names

Did you know that the idea of Zionism was born in our region?! In our city?! In Zemun?!

It is known to the well-informed that the founder of the political movement of Zionism, which, in simplified terms, represents the idea of the return of dispersed Jews worldwide to Israel, was Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), an Austrian journalist of Jewish origin born in Budapest.

However, it is less known that the actual progenitor of this idea was Jehuda ben Shalom Chai Alkalai (1798-1878), a Jewish priest, Sephardic rabbi, writer, and religious educator, born in Sarajevo, who came to Zemun as a young man and lived there for the next 50 years until the end of his life.

Even as a child, Jehuda Alkalai was sent to Jerusalem for education, where he learned from numerous rabbis and acquired a strong national and religious consciousness at an early age. Upon settling in Zemun, which was then part of southern Hungary, he began working as a teacher for Sephardic children and soon became a rabbi himself. Sephardim were descendants of Jews who were expelled from Spain by royal decree in the late 15th century. The surname Alkalai itself originates from the Spanish region of Alcalá.

While living in Zemun as a Jewish religious educator, he built two Jewish schools and a Sephardic synagogue, which was destroyed during World War II. Inspired by the successes of the French Revolution and the centuries-long aspiration of the Serbian people for liberation from the Turks and the creation of their own state, he conceived the grand, even now relevant and controversial idea of the "return" of all Jews from the diaspora to the Holy Land of Israel and the spiritual unity of the Jewish people. He wrote dozens of books in Belgrade about the difficult situation of Jews, propagating his ideas, the preservation of Jewish culture, the Hebrew language, and tradition, and the struggle against assimilation. Moved by the extremely difficult situation of Jews in Šabac, he founded the first organization for Jewish emigration to Jerusalem (the first of its kind in Europe) in the same city, and later in Zemun and Belgrade.

Some sources claim that he officiated the wedding of Theodor Herzl's parents in Zemun, with whom he was a close friend. Thus, his primal idea was implanted and expanded, only to materialize decades later as the Zionist political-nationalist movement that still has millions of supporters among Jews worldwide.

Controversial or not, it undoubtedly represents a great and everlasting idea, and it is interesting that it originated in our vicinity, isn't it?

Since 1992, the street previously known as Jewish Street and then Primorska Street has been named Rabbi Alkalai Street.