In the Land of Israel: My Family 1809-1949. Nitza Rosovsky
number of “pilgrims and sinners”—to borrow a phrase from Mark Twain—arrived in the Holy Land, both the pious and the curious: missionaries and clergymen, writers and scientific investigators, painters and photographers, famous personalities as well as ordinary sightseers.
Twain, who descended upon Tiberias in 1867, recorded his scathing observations in The Innocents Abroad, published two years after his visit. There he described “the stupid village of Tiberias slumbering under its six funereal plumes of palms,” its people “vermin-tortured vagabonds,” who were best examined at a distance: “They are particularly uncomely Jews, Arabs, and Negroes. Squalor and poverty are the pride of Tiberias.” Upon leaving he wrote in his notebook: “I have only one pleasant reminiscence of this Palestine excursion—time I had the cholera in Damascus.” It turns out that Twain, under contract to a newspaper in California that had financed his trip, discovered on his way back home that several letters he had mailed to the paper from Italy were lost. To fulfill his word quota, he inflated his Holy Land notes by plagiarizing a little, and exaggerating his unfavorable impressions. As he makes clear in The Innocents Abroad, the land was so different from what he learned in Sunday school.
Many travelers—tormented by flies, mosquitoes, and bed bugs—quoted the tenth-century Arab geographer al-Muqadasi: “The King of the Fleas holds his court in Tiberias,” where the citizens “danced in their beds” which they shared with legions of bugs. Some lucky visitors stayed at Dr. Haim Weissmann’s small hotel that was clean, if simply furnished, where they consumed chicken, eggplant, tasty fish from the Sea of Galilee, and wine from Safed. The antiquarian Félicien de Saulcy slept at that hotel in 1850 and was bitten by fleas. The photographer Maxime Du Camp and his travel companion Gustave Flaubert stayed there as well.
Travelers noted the widespread poverty, mentioned the damage caused by the 1837 earthquake, and applauded the hot springs—famous since Roman times—with their elegant bathhouse, rebuilt by Ibrahim Pasha. Christian pilgrims praised the natural beauty of the lake and the mountains, scenery they assumed had changed little since the time of Jesus. The missionary William Thomson, author of The Land and the Book, described the Sea of Galilee and its environs: “To me, Gennesaret and its surroundings are ever fair” because there “our blessed Lord dwelt with men and taught the way of life.” One midnight, when the thermometer stood at 100° Fahrenheit, Thomson wondered why so many people lived in Tiberias, then reflected: “They are chiefly Jews, attracted hither either to cleanse their leprous bodies in her baths, or to purify their unclean spirits by contact with her traditionary and ceremonial holiness.”11
Some travelers commented on the strange dress of Ashkenazi men: either long black coats, striped silk ones, or Indian cotton coats tied with a sash, and hats, either wide-brimmed or trimmed with fur. (I read somewhere that the fur hats were called gatos muertos by the Sephardim—that is “dead cats”—for the way they looked and, perhaps, smelled in the hot summers.) Travelers observed that some Jews were fair-skinned, but many visitors preferred the darker ones—the Sephardim—who had better manners than the Ashkenazim. Most women wore long-sleeved dresses, with bright flowers on a white background, and shawls over their shoulders, though some wore European clothes. A few travelers found the women charming.
Jews revered Tiberias both for its spiritual role after the fall of Jerusalem and for the sages and martyrs who were buried there, and they came on pilgrimage to pray at the numerous tombs. One famous sage said to be buried in Tiberias is Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai who had himself smuggled out of Jerusalem in a coffin during the Roman siege, foreseeing the destruction of the Temple and fearing the disappearance of Judaism. He soon founded academies where his people were taught how to practice their religion without the central authority of Jerusalem and the Temple. One tradition, questioned by some, has it that the body of Maimonides—the famous philosopher and codifier of Jewish law who was a physician in Saladin’s court in Egypt and died there in 1204—was brought to Tiberias and re-interred there.
MENAHEM MENDEL AND KOLEL REISIN
By late 1839, my ancestor Menahem was one of the three officials, memunim, who led Kolel Reisin. The poverty-stricken kolel was then at one of its lowest points because the earthquake killed many of its members and only twenty-four adult males survived. Some Hasidim began to think that the whole idea of settling in Eretz Israel to try and hasten Redemption was a mistake and that the earthquake, which killed so many of them, was God’s punishment.
In the 1855 Montefiore census, the names of Menahem and Leah’s seven children were given, starting with Haya, aged sixteen. The census taker noted that Menahem “serves the needs of the community faithfully”—osek betzorchei tzibur be’emuna—and that “he needs [help] with the marriage of his daughter,” hu tzarich lenesuei bito. Did he require financial aid for Haya’s dowry and wedding, or did he worry that she was becoming an old maid? In either case, his wish was soon granted as Haya married Mordechai Mottel Ashkenazi. Esther, their first child and my great-grandmother, was born within a year.
The three officials mentioned above signed Kolel Reisin’s 1855 census sheets to testify to the accuracy of the data. The kolel comprised of ninety-two people, including two orphans and six widows. It had four societies, manned by volunteers: Hevra Kdosha, the Burial Society; Bikkur Holim, Visiting the Sick; Malbish Arumim, Clothing the Naked; and Olei Regalim, a society which assisted people going on pilgrimage to Jerusalem during the festivals of Succot, Passover, and Shavuot, a tradition that goes back to biblical times. The more affluent Kolel Volhyn sponsored additional good causes, such as providing for poor brides and supporting needy Torah students. Both kolelim had small study houses or rooms where tutors instructed four to six students each, and were paid a pittance, between sixty and a hundred piasters a month, depending on whether they taught youngsters “from Alef-Bet to Torah,” or guided older students through the intricacies of the Mishna and Talmud.
In 1862 Menahem’s name appeared on a letter sent jointly by the Sephardi and Ashkenazi communities in Tiberias to the officials of Kupat Eretz Israel—the Fund for the Land of Israel—based in Trieste. The letter, another appeal for help, described events during the preceding year when a cholera epidemic had broken out in the city and the Jewish community had to borrow thirty thousand piasters in order to send its members to the mountains of Safed to escape the outbreak. The letter is preserved in Jerusalem, at The Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, under “Trieste: Poveri di Terra Santa.” (File IT/Ts 161.) The last signature and name affixed to it is “Menahem Mendel.” I saw the original letter at the Archives where I gingerly touched his pen strokes. When the 1866 census was taken, Menahem was still an official of the kolel, but Leah was dead by then. In 1861 her daughter Haya had a child whom she named Leah, after her mother.
Letter from the Jewish community in Tiberias, 1862. Menahem Mendel’s signature and name are the last two on the left.
Courtesy of the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem
I try to imagine Menahem, with a long beard and ear locks, wearing an ankle-length coat and perhaps a shtreimel, a fur hat, even during the oppressively hot summers. Menahem Mendel’s word was said to be law and he was not only honored and respected by all the Jews in Tiberias, but even the Arabs admired him. Yet within the family, he was reputed to have been “a difficult person.”
As one of the leaders of a tiny kolel completely dependent on charity from abroad, he surely worried about the welfare of his small community and his large family. Yet there must have been some bright spots in his life. From its very beginning Hasidut was a joyous movement whose followers worshipped God in ecstasy. They had communal meals and drank wine together, and they sang and danced. Rabbi Israel wrote in 1777 that the Hasidim were happy to be “in our land, the object of our delight, the desire of our hearts and joy of our pursuits ...”12 In 1789 another Hasid described praying at the tombs of the sages in Safed: it was “like milk and fatness [overabundance]. And now my lips are full of joy and