Coming Home to Zion: A Pictorial History of Pre-Israel Palestine

Dust jacket notes: "Coming Home to Zion is the story of the birth of Israel - a stunning pictorial documentary of the formative years of the Jewish nation. The drama of Israel's emergence is felt as Abraham Shulman chronicles the beginnings of Jewish unification in nineteenth-century Europe to the first settlements in Palestine; the pioneer life style of the early kibbutzim to the founding of Tel Aviv as the first Jewish city; the revival of Hebrew as a living language to the growth of the arts and the new celebrations of ancient holidays. Coming Home to Zion captures the spirit as well as the heroic deeds of the first Israelis. It highlights the idealism, the dedication, and the exuberance of a people who ended a two-thousand-year exile and transformed their dream of a homeland into a reality. As Golda Meir describes in her introduction: 'Israel is a Jewish State that has come into existence as the result of the longing, the faith, and the determination of an ancient people. The book of Abraham Shulman Coming Home to Zion is an attempt to demonstrate - with the help of rare and exquisite photographs - how this state of longing has been transformed into reality. It is a pictorial history of the dream that has lived in the Jewish mind since the destruction of the Temple; of how this dream has developed from a mystical, religious, and liturgical beginning until it has attained the dimension of a political movement; and finally, how this movement has consequently taken shape in human acts that have become the foundations of the Jewish State....'"