Читать книгу In the Land of Israel: My Family 1809-1949 - Nitza Rosovsky - Страница 15

ELTE LEAH—OR LEAH—the daughter of Avraham and Hinke, was already married in 1839 when the first census was taken. Her husband was Menahem Mendel Epstein who was born in Minsk, Belarus, in 1821 and arrived in Palestine in 1836. Jews had lived in Minsk since the sixteenth century and the city’s Polish rulers granted them the right to own land and to engage in crafts and commerce. Even after 1793, when the city came under Russian rule, Jews continued to do well there, both materially and spiritually. When Menahem left, the Jewish community numbered about twelve thousand, one of the largest in Russia.

In Tiberias, Menahem joined the Russian kolel. By then, Hasidut itself had changed since splits began to occur among the Baal Shem’s followers in Europe after his death in 1760. At first the leadership passed on to his disciple, Dov Baer, the Maggid of Mezeritch, but by the third generation, as the movement continued to spread, individual zadikim, the leaders of the Hasidim, set up their own courts where each interpreted the Baal Shem’s teachings in his own way. Decentralization thus resulted in bitter disputes among various sects and, for both ideological and practical reasons, what happened in Europe affected the Hasidim in Eretz Israel. Near the end of the eighteenth century a major quarrel broke out in the country among the Hasidim over the division of funds collected in Belarus and Volhyn, and the Russian Hasidim broke away and established their own kolel, Kolel Reisin. Avraham of Kalisk, one of the leaders of the 1777 aliya, led the kolel until his death in 1810.