In the Land of Israel: My Family 1809-1949. Nitza Rosovsky
than in all the days when I lived abroad.”13
Menahem Mendel died on November 17, 1879, and was buried in Tiberias.
THE FAMILY ASHKENAZI
ARRIVAL FROM TELENESHTI
According to the 1855 Montefiore Census, my great-great-great-great-grandparents, Yoel and Sarah Rivke Hinde Ashkenazi, came to Safed from Teleneshti in 1853. Their grandson, Mordechai Mottel, would later marry Haya, daughter of Menachem and Leah Epstein. Yoel was a learned man, a ben Torah, and an official of Kolel Volhyn, which included some Hasidim from Bessarabia. I do not know what Yoel’s occupation was in Teleneshti, only that his father-in-law served as the head of the rabbinical court there (see Ashkenazi-Epstein family tree, above).
Teleneshti is a small town in Moldova, located in a region once known as Bessarabia. The country itself lies between the Dniester and Prut rivers, bordered by Ukraine and Romania. Documents from the early seventeenth century show that the Ottoman authorities, which ruled part of the country before 1812, invited Jewish and Armenian merchants from Poland, especially from the area of Lviv—where Hacham Zvi died—to come and resettle the countryside, which for centuries had been depleted by attacks from neighboring countries. A 1794 pinkas, or register, of the Jewish burial society in Teleneshti attested to the existence of an established community.14
Map of Moldova, c. 2007
Courtesy of d-maps.com
(http://d-maps.com/carte.php?lib=moldova_map&num_car=27000&lang=en)
Anti-Semitism was prevalent all over Europe, and Bessarabia, under the powerful influence of the Orthodox Church, was no exception. Throughout Eastern Europe Jews often found themselves in the position of middlemen, dealing with aristocratic landowners on one side, and serfs, peasants, and merchants on the other. While the local peasant could see “God’s will” in the feudal system that required him to work for the aristocracy and give up most of his crops, he looked upon the Jew as a “leech”—a moneylender, a tavern owner. Venomous sermons on Sundays reinforced the peasant’s hatred and made the Jew a convenient scapegoat. Yet there were no state-sponsored pogroms in Moldava during the eighteenth century, and edicts show that the civic authorities warned against persecuting the Jews who were helping develop the countryside. The landowners were interested in the skills the Jews brought with them and granted them land for building synagogues, houses of study, ritual baths, and cemeteries. Jews engaged in agriculture, raised cattle, grew fish in ponds, and distilled and sold alcohol. Some were artisans, wagoners, and innkeepers.
Teleneshti was situated in a heavily wooded area with oaks, birches, orchards, and vineyards. Every year merchants from surrounding countries descended upon the town to buy the produce of the fertile black earth—wheat, maize, barley, flax, tobacco, fruit, wine—so the citizens were aware of events in the outside world. Life was relatively secure for Jews in the countryside. Even after Bessarabia was annexed by Russia in 1812, it managed to maintain an autonomous status and was not affected by the tsar’s anti-Jewish legislation. But this began to change and by 1852 compulsory military service was imposed on Bessarabian Jews. This may have expedited the departure of the Ashkenazi family for the Holy Land. Six or seven other families from Teleneshti had settled in Safed in 1852 and 1853, according to the censuses.
Yoel died in 1855, followed by Sarah six years later. Their daughter Miriam had married Yitzhak whose last name was also Ashkenazi. According to the Humashim, they were buried in Safed but I am not sure about the sequence of events since I found their son, Mordechai Mottel, listed in the 1855 census under “Ashkenazi Orphans” in Safed. He was born in Teleneshti in 1840, arrived in Eretz Israel in 1852 and was the grandson of Yoel of Teleneshti.
MORDECHAI MOTTEL ASHKENAZI
Baba Esther often talked about her father Mordechai Mottel who, after marrying Haya Epstein moved to Tiberias, where he joined the Russian kolel to which his father-in-law belonged. Years later he applied for British protection, a move made possible by the Capitulations which placed non-Ottoman citizens—as well as people under the shield of a foreign power—within the legal safeguards of their own consular representatives. Great Britain in particular became a patron of the Jews in Palestine and came to their aid on numerous occasions. Being under British protection had many advantages, which explains Mordechai’s application addressed to the British consul in Haifa and dated April 1, 1872. I do not know whether British protection was granted to the family.
In 1865, many people died in Tiberias during a cholera epidemic. The city had no real medical facilities and the need for a hospital was acute.15 In 1872, three kolelim, Volhyn, Karlin, and the Russian kolel—the latter represented by Mordechai—joined together in what was known as Hevrat Bikkur Holim, “Society for Visiting the Sick.” A courtyard and four houses which belonged to the kolelim were made available to the society and soon some sort of a hospital was set up there with a doctor who appeared at irregular intervals. But the city’s hot climate and poor sanitary conditions brought on many diseases which the small facility could not handle. So in 1883, several rabbis and officials from Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias, and Hebron came out in favor of building a proper hospital in Tiberias since the city’s therapeutic hot springs attracted a large number of sick people. Two years later, in the spring of 1885, Israel Dov Frumkin, the editor of Habazeleth, visited the city and wrote at great length about the need for a hospital. (His paper, an organ of the Hasidim, was one of the earliest Hebrew newspapers in the country, first published in 1863.) That summer a group of seven people wrote to Frumkin, hoping he would publish their letter in Habazeleth and get others to support building a hospital. In Tiberias, they noted, even those who came to the hot springs had no one who could tell them how long they should stay in the water, and since “there is no doctor, there are no drugs ... [and] people die before their time.” Mordechai Mottel Ashkenazi was the first person to sign the letter. I came upon it unexpectedly, in 1989, while searching through the Zionist Archives in Jerusalem (File: Tiberias, A199 #59). I had just returned from Tiberias, after one of my futile searches for Mordechai’s tomb, so finding a letter with his name on it was simply overwhelming.
The need to set up a Jewish hospital became even more urgent when a Scottish missionary group—the Committee for the Conversion of the Jews—decided to establish the Sea of Galilee Medical Mission in Tiberias. It opened a clinic there in 1885, headed by Dr. David Watt Torrance, and inaugurated the Scottish Hospital ten years later. Providing health care was a tactic often used by missionaries in the Holy Land. While most Jews shunned efforts to convert them, many were tempted to consult a doctor—even an evangelizer—if the life of a child was in danger and no Jewish doctor was available. Once a Christian health facility opened, the Jewish community galvanized to offer similar care, and so a Jewish hospital was finally built in Tiberias in 1896. Dr. Torrance, it turned out, spent little time on saving souls and devoted the next forty years of his life caring for the sick in Tiberias. He had a huge following among Jews and Muslims alike and was mourned by all when he died in 1923.16
I found Mordechai’s footprints in another episode. In 1891, before the Jewish hospital opened, a Dr. Hillel Yaffe was invited to Tiberias to see if he might be interested in serving there. In his memoirs Yaffe described his first meeting with some forty men, all Orthodox, dressed in white trousers and cotton or silk coats, with long beards and ear locks. A secular Jew, the doctor hastened to assure the gathering that he would not break any religious laws in his clinic nor would he force any patient to do so unless illness dictated it. One of the more important people in the group, wrote Yaffe, a man called Mottel Ashkenazi, stood up and said: “Sir, we already have a wise and God-fearing rabbi in Tiberias. What we need now is a medical specialist.” Pleased by this attitude, Yaffe accepted the position. Later, no one asked why he did not attend synagogue services: “They never worried about the relationship