the 1855 census, “the widow of Avraham Pinhas the Cohen,” but this time her first name was given: Hinke Basha. (According to that census, she was born in 1795 and came to Palestine in 1805. Dates sometimes vary slightly in the different censuses. I use the dates from the first census, from 1839.) I do not know where her husband was born, only that he belonged to the Russian kolel, to the followers of Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk, leader of the 1777 aliya. (The term kolel, which means “community,” had been used since the late 1700s to identify a group of people who originated from the same place in the Diaspora and who remained together as an organized group in Eretz Israel, largely for the allocation of funds: Jews abroad were more generous when the money they gave went to support people who came from their home town.)
My great-great-great-great-grandmother Hinke Basha—Hinke from now on—arrived in the country at a time of great uncertainty. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, Palestine was but a neglected corner of the Ottoman Empire. Corruption was rampant, reaching down from Constantinople to the outer edges of the sultan’s realm. Local pashas imposed ever-higher taxes, the countryside was depleted, commerce was at a standstill, and poverty reigned. Epidemics periodically spread through the population and only three hundred thousand people lived there at the turn of the century: The vast majority were Muslims, about ten percent were Christians, and the Jews numbered three thousand.
In Tiberias Hinke would have lived in the Jewish Quarter, located at the edge of the Sea of Galilee, surrounded by a wall within the rebuilt Crusader wall. Tiberias is one of Judaism’s Four Holy Cities, along with Jerusalem, Safed, and Hebron. It was founded around AD 18 and named in honor of the Roman emperor Tiberius. After the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in AD 70, many Jews sought refuge in the Galilee and Tiberias became their spiritual capital. The Sanhedrin, the Supreme Council, settled there in the third century and much of the compilation of the Mishna and the final editing of the Jerusalem (or Palestinian) Talmud took place there. Several sages are buried in Tiberias, and throughout the ages Jews came on pilgrimage to pray at their tombs. Saladin demolished the city in 1187, on his way to the nearby Horns of Hattin—a volcanic hill with two peaks—where his victory sealed the fate of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem.
Several attempts had been made to rebuild Tiberias and by the time Hinke arrived, about fifteen hundred people were residing there: half were Muslims, the other half Jews, including Sephardim and more recent Ashkenazi immigrants, mostly Hasidim from Russia, Lithuania, and Poland. A number of Christian families lived there as well, and the city encompassed a Catholic church, two mosques, and several synagogues. Most houses were built of basalt blocks, hewn from the nearby volcanic hills, and the rough black masonry, held together by thick gray mortar, lent Tiberias a distinct air. The Sea of Galilee supplied the residents with fresh fish and, in the market, locally grown fruit and vegetables were available, as were oil, wheat, and cotton produced in the vicinity. But daily life was not easy, especially for the Hasidim: Few of them were gainfully employed and, in addition, they had accumulated large debts over the years, a situation aggravated by arbitrary taxes and fines imposed by the authorities.
Hinke and Avraham lived through several epidemics that plagued Tiberias in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Then, in 1826, a year after the birth of their daughter Elte Leah, a locust infestation devastated the crops in the Jordan Valley and hunger spread across the land. In 1831 a severe drought resulted in another famine. Kolel Reisin, the Russian community to which Avraham belonged, was among the poorest in the city and the family must have had a difficult time. Also in 1831 the Egyptian ruler Mohammad Ali rose against the Turks, and his armies, led by his son Ibrahim Pasha, conquered Palestine and Syria. Ibrahim introduced many reforms and brought a measure of stability to the land, but he also instituted compulsory military service for Muslims and levied certain taxes on them, previously paid by Jews and Christians alone. Those new laws caused growing unrest among the Muslims, resulting in a peasant uprising in 1834. When it reached the Galilee, Arab villagers, falaheen, attacked the Jews in Safed. Homes were looted, Torah scrolls destroyed, women raped, dozens of men killed and hundreds more wounded. The Jews in Tiberias escaped the riots by paying a large bribe to the rebels. After thirty-three days the forces of Ibrahim Pasha finally prevailed and thirteen rebels, including the ruler of Safed, were executed; the Pasha ordered that the Jews in Tiberias be given back their money.
According to the 1839 census, the earthquake that had killed Avraham also caused ten thousand piasters worth of damage to his property in Tiberias—now his widow’s. (From 1825 to 1884, one hundred piasters equaled one Egyptian pound, which in turn was worth about $7; from 1885 to 1939, a pound was worth $5. For current value, see Samuel H. Williamson, “Seven Ways to Compute the Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount—1774 to the Present Time.”)6
The two cities in the Galilee where the Hasidim—including my family—had settled were intimately related. Only twenty-two miles apart, their climates are very different since Tiberias is located some 680 feet below sea level, while Safed is at 2,650 feet above. Although it took six hours to climb up to Safed by mule or donkey, and three to come back down, people from Safed used to go to Tiberias to take advantage of its mild winters, while the citizens of Tiberias sought relief from hot and humid summers in Safed. There were many marriages between Jewish families in the two cities and events in one place affected lives in the other.
THE EARTHQUAKE
It was the stories my great-grandmother Esther told me about the 1837 earthquake that got me interested in family history many years after she died. I had always assumed that the little Mottel who was thrown out of the window by his mother was Esther’s father, which—as mentioned before—my later research found to be incorrect. But there were plenty of other Mottels in the family and the story must relate to one of them.
The earthquake, in which about one third of the country’s Jews perished, was one of the greatest natural disasters ever to hit the area. Tremors were felt from Damascus to Hebron, but the most devastating effects were in Safed. The Jewish community there was the hardest hit because the neighborhood where most of the Sephardim and many of the Hasidim lived consisted of two-story stone houses that clung to the side of a mountain. When the quake came the buildings tumbled down to the valley, one on top of the other, trapping their inhabitants in layer upon layer of debris. The Perushim (or Mitnagdim), most of the Muslims, and Safed’s small Christian community lived in other parts of the city which were also leveled but where fewer people lost their lives.
Haraash Hagadol, the Great Earthquake, occurred on Sunday, January 1, 1837, at five in the evening, just as darkness enveloped the land. In Safed, as elsewhere, most adult Jewish males were gathered in their synagogues for the evening prayers and few escaped. In addition to those who were killed instantly, others were caught under the rubble and could not be rescued. The women, children, and the aged who survived could do little to help, lacking manpower and equipment. The screams of the dying were heard for days yet no one could save them, not even their family members who were listening to their cries. There were no doctors, medicine, or food for the injured above ground, nor clothing to protect them from the icy January nights and many who could have been saved perished. Even some of those who escaped unscathed died of hunger or cold and, it was said, of sorrow.
For over two weeks the survivors were on their own. Under the primitive conditions in the country, news of the magnitude of the disaster took a week to reach Beirut and ten days to get to Jerusalem. Rescue teams were organized in both places. Two missionaries, William M. Thomson—who later wrote the bestseller The Land and the Book—and E. Scott Calman—a Lithuanian Jew who had converted to Christianity—led a small group from Beirut that arrived in Safed with some medical supplies on January 17. And Rabbi Israel of Shklov, the head of the Perushim in Safed who happened to be in Jerusalem when the quake struck, hurried back bringing with him twelve thousand piasters (about $840), which he borrowed from the Sephardim in Jerusalem to help feed and clothe the survivors. His group arrived in the ruined city on January 22, three weeks after the quake.
There are no exact numbers but