In the Land of Israel: My Family 1809-1949. Nitza Rosovsky

      Gravestone of my great-great-great grandfather, Menahem Mendel, 1879

      I laid a small stone on Yoel’s tomb in remembrance, as is the custom, and put to rest the shadows of the past. As I cast a final glance in the direction of the sparkling lake, over the older part of the cemetery which I had already explored, an inscription caught my attention, carved onto a tombstone which was slightly better preserved than the ones around it. On its side I could see the number assigned to it by the Burial Society, 1501. When I got closer I could actually read the inscription: “Menahem Mendel son of Mordechai, died on rosh hodesh Kislev, Taram. May his soul be preserved among the living.” Rosh hodesh means the beginning—the first two days—of the month. I was almost afraid to check the photocopied pages of the Humashim that I was carrying with me. But there it was, in Mordechai Mottel’s own handwriting: “The anniversary of my late father-in-law, Rav Menahem Mendel, son of Rav Mordechai of blessed memory, 2 Kislev, Taram [November 17, 1879], Tiberias.” So while I did not find Mordechai Mottel, I did come upon the grave of his father-in-law, my great-great-great-grandfather. Was it a mere accident? Even though Professor Israel Bartal of the Hebrew University, who is an expert on the history of the Jews of Palestine, told me that many Hasidim claimed a relationship to Hacham Zvi whether true or not—I must confess that finding Menahem Mendel’s final resting place and Hacham Zvi’s name on Yoel’s tomb seemed like an omen, a signal that I should persevere.

      GOING UP TO THE HOLY LAND

      BY 1989 I HAD SPENT a lot of time in archives in both Safed and Tiberias but found little useful material since natural and man-made disasters had caused much distraction in those towns: the great earthquake in 1837, the cloudburst and flood in Tiberias in 1934, wars and changes of regimes—between 1918 and 1948 the country had gone from Ottoman to British to Israeli or Jordanian rule. Still, by then I had learned that the Ashkenazis were Hasidim and that at some point they left Bessarabia to come to Palestine, so I tried to better understand the relationship between Hasidut—the religious movement which emerged in Eastern Europe around the middle of the eighteenth century—and aliya—“going up” to settle in Eretz Israel.

      This chapter is not directly related to my family but it provides background information about the early years of the Hasidim in Safed and Tiberias.

      HASIDUT AND ALIYA

      Since the sixteenth century, Safed, the city where my great-great-great-great-grandfather Yoel Ashkenazi died in 1856, had served as a magnet for Kabbalists, for Jewish mysticists. Among those who settled there, none was more influential than Rabbi Yitzhak Luria Ashkenazi—not a relative—who moved to Safed around 1570. Facts and fable mingle when the story of Luria’s life is told: how he understood the talk of birds and animals, how he identified the burial places of many sages as he walked around Safed with his disciples. After he died his own tomb became a place of pilgrimage. His doctrine, known as Lurianic Kabbala, had great appeal for the masses because it made ordinary people feel that through tikkun, “restoration,” they could influence cosmic events. Tikkun is a complex process consisting of spiritual actions among which are prayer and the observance of the mitzvot, of God’s commandments. Since certain mitzvot can only be fulfilled in Eretz Israel, some Hasidim believed that they could affect events by settling there and, through tikkun, cause an awakening from “down below” and bring Redemption closer.

      Hasidut has been called “the daughter of Kabbala” because, like the older movement, it differs from traditional Jewish rationalism. Founded in the middle of the eighteenth century by Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, “Master of the Divine Name,” it was an anti-establishment movement, a reaction against the physically dreary and spiritually arid life of Jews at that time, and it provided the common people with a sense of joy in worship. The popularity of the movement must be seen against the background of the desolate sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, beginning with the Expulsion from Spain in 1492 and culminating in the Chmielnicki massacres (1648-1658) when Cossacks from the Ukraine slaughtered tens of thousands of Jews in three hundred communities. The political situation of the Jews was dismal as well. Most were denied a dignified occupation; riots and blood libels—when Jews were accused of killing Christians to use their blood for ritual purposes—were common and the law offered little protection. Not allowed to own land and limited by law to a few occupations such as lending money and selling alcohol, the Jews were hated by the peasants who were in their debt and vilified by the church as Christ-killers. Their own religious leaders did not bring them much comfort, particularly in Poland where the rabbis were constantly engaged in the reinterpretation of the Law. The ordinary man in the street—and especially the one living in a remote and isolated village—could neither understand nor follow the rabbis’ talmudic disquisitions. Instead, superstition triumphed, learning declined, and a wide chasm appeared between the scholars who dwelt in the city and the uneducated—if pious—masses in the countryside. All those conditions help explain the rapid spread of Hasidut.

      The Baal Shem himself set out to go to Eretz Israel but for reasons unknown turned back. While he did not complete the journey, his brother-in-law, Avraham Gershon of Kutow did, and he settled with his family in Hebron in 1747. For centuries living conditions in Palestine were so difficult that it was mainly old men and women who went there, wishing to be buried in its consecrated ground. But this began to change, even before Avraham Gershon came, with the arrival of several notable groups such as the one led by Rabbi Yehuda Hasid of Poland—hasid here means “pious,” not a follower of Hasidut which began half a century later—who arrived in Jerusalem in 1700 with perhaps several hundred followers, or that of Rabbi Haim Attar of Morocco—who came to the city with his two wives and his disciples—and established a yeshiva there in 1741. Avraham Gershon’s aliya created a bridge between the ancient land and Hasidut, the new spiritual movement. Others followed him to the Holy Land and they too brought along their families. About thirty Hasidim left for Tiberias in 1764, then another group of three hundred Hasidim, led by Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk, arrived in Safed in 1777. I do not know whether one of my ancestors came with the latter group but sixty years later, yet another Menahem Mendel, my great-great-great-grandfather whose tomb I had located in Tiberias, became one of the leaders of the remnants of the 1777 aliya.

      THE 1777 ALIYA

      I have no family records from the eighteenth century, but I can still hear Baba Esther’s voice: “They came in little boats across the Black Sea.” Even if my ancestors arrived in the country later, their voyages and experiences would have been similar to those who came there with Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk.

      In 1777, when the total Jewish population in Palestine numbered three thousand, the arrival of three hundred Hasidim was an important event. Led by Menahem Mendel along with Avraham of Kalisk and Israel of Polotsk, the Hasidim came from Belarus and Volhyn—a province once in Poland and now in northwest Ukraine. They began their difficult journey by land then crossed the Dniester, the river that marked the border of the Ottoman Empire. They continued to Galati where they boarded small boats and crossed over the marshy Danube delta and the Black Sea to Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, now Istanbul. There they lingered until they could join some local Sephardi Jews who were going on pilgrimage to the Holy Places in Eretz Israel and together they sailed down the eastern shore of the Mediterranean.

      A month before Rosh Hashana