gentleman, in a black coat and hat and with moderately long ear locks and beard, entered. He was collecting money for a religious girls’ orphanage. I handed him a few dollars, a respectable sum, I thought, for a door-to-door solicitor. He took a long look at me, apparently recognized me, and announced that it was not fitting, es past nisht, for the granddaughter of Sarah Berman to give only a few dollars.
I did not need to recite my credentials to Israel Ashkenazi who remembered me as a small girl and greeted me like a long-lost relative—which I was. He and his wife Malka immediately invited me to their house and there we sat—over the mandatory tea and cake without which a visit in Israel is not a visit—and tried to catch up with all that had happened to the many descendants of Mordechai Mottel Ashkenazi. When I mentioned Hacham Zvi, Israel was astonished that I did not know more about him and suggested that I begin by looking him up in the Encyclopaedia Judaica.
When I asked about Ashkenazis who lived in the country during the nineteenth century, Israel recalled the Humashim, the first five books of the Bible—the Torah or Pentateuch—which belonged to his late father and where various names were recorded. A frantic search through well-stocked bookshelves eventually produced the Humashim that, ultimately, provided the key to the family’s beginnings in Eretz Israel.
THE “FAMILY BIBLE”
The Humashim originally belonged to Mordechai Mottel Ashkenazi of Tiberias—Mordechai from now on with some exceptions—as was noted on the frontispieces of several of the volumes. They were inherited in turn by his son Yaacov, then by his grandson Yehuda, and finally by Israel. Listed on several pages, in three different handwritings, were many yortzeiten, the dates on which various family members had died. I recognized most of the names and all of the burial places: Tiberias, Safed, Jerusalem, Beirut. I copied a lot of the information and, once back in the United States, unsuccessfully tried to fit the puzzle pieces together. It took an additional trip to Israel before I began to understand the data.
The volumes were stamped with three different seals: The first was “Rabbiner M. M. Aschkenasi, Tiberias,” the same trilingual seal that was in the prayer book Mordechai Cohen had shown me. Next came “Jacob. P. Aschkenasi, Tiberias,” in English and Hebrew, and finally several different versions of Yehuda’s seal with “Ashkenazi” appearing both in Hebrew and in the more contemporary English transliteration. In the Hebrew version Yehuda added: “Grandchild [descendant] of the Gaon, the Sage, Hacham Zvi.” Eventually I was able to assign the three distinct Hebrew handwritings to the different seal owners. Mordechai’s was an elegant square hand, as formal as that used by scribes to copy the holy words of the Torah; his son Yaacov wrote in small, even letters, in straight lines; Yehuda had a freer hand—the letters were larger and the lines sloped downward from right to left. Noted were the dates on which several of their grandparents, parents, or in-laws had died. Yehuda included the yortzeiten of a number of aunts and uncles, and in a shaky hand noted the passing of an infant son who had succumbed to pneumonia. Jews traditionally registered dates of birth and death in the pinkasim, the ledgers of their communities. But it is important for family members in later generations to know the exact day and month when someone died since, in addition to the Kaddish and other prayers said on the yortzeit, special liturgical passages appropriate to that very date are also recited. The year is not relevant and thus was not always noted in the Humashim, and neither were dates of birth.
Mordechai recoreded the yortzeiten in several Humashim: “The anniversary of my grandfather, the pious rav [an honorific title, not necessarily a rabbi], the renowned son of saints in the chain of distinguished lineage, Rav Yoel Ashkenazi of blessed memory, died 16 Tevet, Tarta”z [December 24, 1855], in the Holy City of Safed, may she be rebuilt soon, in our days, Amen.” Next was “the anniversary of my modest and pious grandmother, the descendant of saints, Mrs. Sarah Rivka Hinde of blessed memory, daughter of the righteous Rabbi Israel, of blessed pious memory, the head of the rabbinical court in Teleneshti, died 10 Heshvan, Tarka”v [October 10, 1861].” (Teleneshti, I later found out, is a small town in Moldova, in the former USSR.) This was followed by the yortzeiten of Mordechai’s in-laws: Menahem Mendel, the son of another Mordechai and his wife Elte Leah, daughter of Avraham Pinhas. Both Yaacov and Yehuda continued to record yortzeiten but the practice died with them.
Yoel Ashkenazi “the Elder” was the only person described as the “son of saints in the chain of distinguished lineage.” Was it in order to remind everyone that the family descended from Zvi Ashkenazi? For a long time I researched the life of Hacham Zvi, hoping, in vain, that through him and his many descendants I could find out when my family arrived in Eretz Israel.
Zvi’s was an amazing life. He was born in 1660 in a small town in Moravia where his family found refuge after the Cossacks’ attack on Vilna five years earlier. When his maternal grandfather, Ephraim Hacohen, was appointed rabbi in Budapest, the rest of the family moved there and young Zvi was sent to a Sephardi yeshiva in Salonika where he acquired the title hacham, the equivalent of rabbi, by which he was known for the rest of his life. He eventually held the position of rabbi in Altona and Hamburg, then in Amsterdam, and finally in Lvov (also known as Lemberg, and now Lviv), under Poland at the time. He died in 1718; his wife Sarah Rivka, only thirty-nine years old, died a year later. They left behind ten children.
The book of Genesis which belonged to my great-great-grandfather, Mordechai Mottel Ashkenazi. Printed in Zhitamir, Ukraine, in 1861
Courtesy of Israel Ashkenazi, Jerusalem
The dates on which several family members died, recorded by Mordechai Mottel Ashkenazi: his grandmother, his in-laws, and his grandfather
Courtesy of Israel Ashkenazi, Jerusalem
Zvi is best known for his collection of responsa, answers to Jewish legal questions, addressed to him from all over the world. Megilat Sefer, an autobiography written by his son, Jacob Emden—a brilliant if controversial figure—is the main source of information about Zvi’s life. I followed as best I could the histories of Zvi’s ten children and their descendants who lived in many different countries. Family stories, tombstone inscriptions, and individual seals all suggest a connection to Hacham Zvi, but I could not prove it. In the end it did not really matter because I eventually found out where different family members of the Ashkenazi and Epstein families came from and when they arrived in Eretz Israel.
TIBERIAS CEMETERY
In the early 1980s, I twice went to visit the cemetery in Tiberias where I searched unsuccessfully for Mordechai Mottel Ashkenazi’s tomb. I tried again in 1989 after I learned the exact date of his death from the yortzeiten list.
Tiberias is situated on the western shore of the Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee. The cemetery lies between the lake on the east and a rocky basalt mountain range on the west. Lakeside frontage is at a premium and modern apartment buildings and hotels are rapidly encroaching upon the ancient burial grounds. The modern part of the cemetery is filled with elaborately carved headstones featuring doves and other creatures that presumably watch over the dead. (This is a Sephardi, rather than Ashkenazi, custom.) In the older part of the necropolis, simple stone slabs mark the graves. Many headstones were washed away during a flood in 1934, as were many of the city’s buildings and the archives of the Jewish community. A few years later, the Burial Society, Hevra Kadisha, whose written records vanished in the flood, numbered the remaining tombs and copied into new ledgers those inscriptions that were still legible. The deceased were listed alphabetically, mostly by first name
