Mount Herzl

This guide to Mount Herzl in Jerusalem opens on August 17, 1949, when the coffin of Theodor Herzl, the Vienna journalist who argued for a Jewish homeland decades before Israel existed, was carried up a bare hilltop before a crowd of four hundred thousand. His will had set one condition for that return, and the architect who designed his grave chose to leave it without an epitaph. Stand at the slab of black granite and look out over the terraces cut into the slope below.