Читать книгу In the Land of Israel: My Family 1809-1949 - Nitza Rosovsky - Страница 14

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 it was estimated that between fifteen hundred and eighteen hundred out of Safed’s thirty-five hundred Jews were killed. The majority were Sephardim, plus about five hundred Hasidim and fifty Perushim. Hundreds of Muslims in the city died as well, perhaps close to a thousand, and some twenty-five Christians. (According to the 1839 Montefiore census, 711 Sephardim and 571 Ashkenazim were living in Safed two years after the earthquake.)

The damage to buildings in Tiberias was almost as severe as in Safed. The earthquake destroyed all the synagogues and rendered streets and markets unrecognizable. Rabbi Israel of Shklov wrote that “the wall around Tiberias fell and a fire rose from the Kinneret and the sea flooded the city ... This one was left without a wife, this one without a husband, this one without sons, and sons without fathers.”⁷ Nearly a third of the city’s total population of twenty-five hundred died. In Tiberias, too, the Jewish Quarter was hardest hit, and of about eight hundred victims, five hundred were Jews. Among them was Avraham Pinhas, my great-great-great-great-grandfather.