IN THE
LAND OF ISRAEL
My Family 1809-1949
NITZA ROSOVSKY
TIDEPOOL PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Copyright © 2015 by Nitza Rosovsky
Published in eBook format in 2015 by TidePool Press
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission.
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ISBN-13: 978-0-9755-5577-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nitza, Rosovsky, 1934-
In the Land of Israel: My Family 1809-1949
p.cm.
ISBN 0-9755557-9-8/978-0-9755557-9-8
1. Rosovsky, Nitza 2. Israel—History 3. Memoir 4. Politics 5. Family Business
I. Title.
2012941217
For Leah, Judy, Michael, Rachel,
Benjamin, Sarah, Abigail, and Ella
Nitza, age 9, portrait by Colm-Bialla, 1943
Israel, 1949 Armistice Lines
INTRODUCTION
SOMEWHERE UP IN HEAVEN my great-grandmother, Esther Ashkenazi Brandeis, must be chuckling. During my childhood, whenever Jerusalem was in winter’s icy grip, I used to crawl under her quilt at night and beg for a story. Baba Esther knew many tales, tales set against the mountains of Safed and the Sea of Galilee where she grew up, enchanting tales about shepherds and fishermen, shoemakers and washerwomen. But whenever she strayed into reality and reminisced about her own life, my attention wandered. Facts, after all, were so boring. Half a century later, as I was interviewing one relative after another, rushing from archive to library to cemetery in an effort to piece together my family’s history, I could almost hear Esther saying: “Ah, Nitzaleh, if you had only listened!”
When I began my search for roots I also realized how little I knew about Jews in Europe, where my ancestors came from, even though I was a graduate of the Hebrew Gymnasium in Jerusalem, a well-known secular high school, where my classmates and I spent many hours a week studying the annals of the Jewish people. But it was almost as if history stopped in AD 70 when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem, bringing Jewish sovereignty to an end, and resumed in 1881, when the first Zionists left Eastern Europe for Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel. Eighteen centuries of Jewish life in the Diaspora hardly seemed to matter.
Another chapter of history that was neglected for a long time by the country’s schools was Jewish life in Palestine before Zionism. Rarely mentioned were the Orthodox men and women who emigrated to the Holy Land over the centuries in the belief that by living there they would hasten the arrival of the Messiah or who just wanted to be buried in hallowed ground. The young Zionists who came to Palestine in the 1880s to till the ancient land looked upon the members of the old Yishuv, the local Jewish community, as idlers who lived off money from abroad, who spent their days praying in the synagogue or studying at the yeshiva, neither gainfully employed nor visibly productive. Even today, in the continuous battle between the ultra-Orthodox and the secular Israelis, neither side seems willing to recognize the achievements or even the aspirations of the other.
Although I was always proud to be a seventh-generation sabra, I was not at all curious about my family’s history because whatever happened before the ascent of Zionism did not seem important. In addition, just dealing with my family’s present was overwhelming. I grew up in my maternal grandparents’ house that stood next door to the family’s business, the Berman Bakery. Dozens of relatives streamed through the house: uncles and cousins were constantly dropping in for coffee, a cold drink, or just to find a quiet corner where a small cabal from the bakery could get together and conspire—alliances within the family were constantly shifting. In addition to the many Bermans, members of my grandmother Sarah’s family sometimes showed up in need of help. “You have to be extra nice to those who are less fortunate than we are,” Grandmother—who had married well—never failed to remind us. Even cousins twice removed were considered immediate family. Awed by their sheer numbers, I often tried to avoid kith and kin, with limited success.
My lack of interest in family affairs changed completely in the late 1970s, when I began to write Jerusalemwalks, a guidebook to some of the older parts of the city. I became fascinated by life in Palestine in the nineteenth century. I wanted to understand what made Jews come to live in that backward corner of the Ottoman Empire and to learn more about their struggles, their conflicts, and their dreams. I contemplated writing a book about that relatively less known period in Jewish history, a period overshadowed by the advance of Zionism in the latter part of the century. While searching through books, biographies, and newspaper accounts from those days, I occasionally came upon the names of relatives, minor characters in the unfolding drama. Then one day I read a contemporary account of the great earthquake of 1837 and I was really shaken—if you’ll pardon the pun. I recalled stories Baba Esther had told me, stories she had heard from her own parents and grandparents, about der groisser roysh, “the big noise,” as the disaster was known in Yiddish. One boy was pushed out of a window by his mother: “Nemt meyn Motteleh,” the woman cried. “Take my little Mottel.” The child was caught by some neighbors and survived. (For years I thought that this Mottel was Esther’s father, but that proved to be wrong.) An uncle crawled under the kitchen table as the house around him collapsed and he survived for a whole week sniffing an onion—a tale I found very amusing when I was young. As I continued to read about the destruction of Safed and Tiberias I thought about Baba Esther’s relatives whose stories she had passed on to me and felt that I was literally touching a moment in history. I then decided to see if I could find enough material about my ancestors so that I could use their narrative as a leitmotif, a thread in a vast tapestry of Jewish history in Palestine. But my journey of discovery became so personal that I soon found myself writing about what was happening in the country merely as background for the story of my family, rather than the other way around. Matters got even more complicated in the second part of the book, where I was writing about
