Reader beware: the beginning of the book—the first part where I trace the family’s sojourn in Tiberias—is complicated and dense. But I believe it is the most important part of the book since it is covers a period in Israel’s history that is not well known, especially abroad. I became fascinated by the daily life of a small community of Jews in the city: where did they come from, how did they make a living, what did they eat, what was their communal life like? I hope that you, the reader, will find it interesting as well. And bear with me and continue reading since the plot thickens and the narrative picks up speed when it gets to Jerusalem.
View of Tiberias, 1898-1914
Courtesy of the Matson Collection, Library of Congress
PART ONE
TIBERIAS
IN SEARCH OF FAMILY HISTORY
FINDING THE BEGINNING of the thread was not easy. As is often the case, my search began much too late, long after my grandparents and their generation were gone. By then I was living in the United States, busy with family, work, and other commitments. But starting in 1978, various projects brought me back to Israel several times a year, and each time I was there I interviewed some relatives. First I questioned my mother’s siblings and a number of her Berman cousins. My mother Leah’s oldest brother, Moshe Berman, confessed that he once owned a copy of our family tree that went back many generations, to the family’s origins in Europe. In his twenties at the time, Moshe was not interested in family history and he lost the tree. He told me that he thought that the first person in our family settled in Palestine in 1777, but he was not sure.
It was my great-grandmother Esther Ashkenazi’s side that intrigued me the most since they had lived in the country for seven generations. As a child I often went with my mother to visit Esther’s surviving siblings—her brother Yoel in Tiberias and her sister Hinke in Safed—and I remembered their children’s and most of their grandchildren’s names, a great asset in the search for roots. Above is a “guide for the perplexed” with the names of the Ashkenazi descendants whom I eventually interviewed printed in bold, as is my name at the bottom.
INTERVIEWS
I will only mention a couple of the interviews. A key one was in 1983, with my mother’s second cousin Haya Kalmanovitch, who possessed a trove of anecdotes about family members in Safed and Tiberias. She spoke of Esther’s parents—and my great-great-grandparents—Mordechai Mottel Ashkenazi and his wife Haya, née Epstein, after whom she and several other women in the family were named. The Ashkenazis, she said, were Hasidim who came from Bessarabia, part of Moldova, and were descendants of the famous and influential rabbi, Hacham Zvi Ashkenazi. Haya then suggested that I visit her mother, Yocheved Ashkenazi King, who, to my surprise, was still alive.
It was only in January of 1985 that I got to see Yocheved. The nursing home where she was spending her last days was located in Petach Tikva, the first modern agricultural colony in Eretz Israel, founded in 1878 by members of the old Yishuv, the Jews who lived in Palestine before Zionism. Yocheved, then in her nineties, was delighted to have a visitor and knew who I was as soon as I said my name: “Ah, Leah’s tokhter,” she said as she began to cry, “Leah’s daughter.” We spoke in Yiddish while we sat in the shade of an old eucalyptus tree, away from prying ears. Yocheved’s voice was so soft that at times I was not sure that I was hearing her correctly, yet her memory seemed sharp and she mentioned a few names unfamiliar to me and clarified various relationships. She recalled her grandfather Mordechai Mottel, tall and handsome with a long beard. His wife Haya always kept sweets for her grandchildren in the pocket of her starched white apron. As I left I kissed Yocheved’s wrinkled cheeks, the very cheeks touched by the lips of my great-great-grandparents.
Yocheved died in 1989. I did not see her again.
In the same year, after a long search I found Mordechai Cohen of Tiberias, nephew of Yocheved and great-grandson of Mordechai Mottel. The last time I had seen him was half a century earlier when I spent many happy hours playing with his three sons who were about my age. He showed me a mahzor from 1816, a prayer book for the High Holidays, which belonged to his great-grandfather and bore a trilingual stamp in Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin scripts: “Rabbiner M. M. Aschkenasi, Tiberias.” He too mentioned the seventeenth-century rabbi, Hacham Zvi Ashkenazi: “We are all descended from him, you know. And Rabbi Kook himself once told me that if one of Hacham Zvi’s heirs, even unto the tenth generation, would make a wish at his graveside, that wish will be granted.” A wise man and revered scholar, Avraham Hacohen Kook was the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi in the country; he died in 1935. Mordechai did not know the location of Hacham Zvi’s tomb and it was too late to ask Rabbi Kook.
Among the relatives whose names I remembered were the children of Yehuda Ashkenazi who was my grandmother Sarah’s beloved cousin and confidant and a frequent visitor to our house in Jerusalem. I recalled that one of his sons was named Hillel and that he used to practice law in Jerusalem. When I opened the telephone book, I found two lawyers by that name, one married to a Claudette, the other to a Ruth. I gambled on Ruth and dialed the number. A woman answered. “May I please speak to Hillel Ashkenazi?” I asked.
“Who’s calling?”
“My name is Nitza Rosovsky and I am Sarah Berman’s granddaughter. I am collecting material about the Ashkenazi family, and I wonder if Hillel could help me.” An awkward silence greeted this lengthy opening statement, and it gave me time to think of the numerous calls of this kind that I had received over the years from various people who claimed a Rosovsky ancestor and wanted to find out whether they were related to my husband. Since I had been blessed by an abundance of my own relatives, the prospect of discovering additional ones was not necessarily a priority, so I usually suggested that the potential kin call my brother-in-law Alex, explaining—truthfully—that he was the expert on Rosovsky history. The prolonged silence ended when Ruth said: “Hillel doesn’t know much about the family. Why don’t you call my brother-in-law Israel? He is the one interested in family history.” When I stopped chortling, I made the call.
Perhaps I should explain why in Israel I still identify myself as Sarah Berman’s granddaughter. In her time, Sarah was a Jerusalem landmark who spent her days dealing with beggars who came to the house, with representatives of various charitable organizations, with genteel if poor relatives—the list goes on. In 1965, ten years after I had left Jerusalem, my husband and I were spending a sabbatical there. We lived in a small apartment where the nameplate on the door simply said “Rosovsky.” One day the bell rang and a handsome 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