Читать книгу In the Land of Israel: My Family 1809-1949 - Nitza Rosovsky - Страница 16

Bits and pieces of information form a mosaic that depicts life in Tiberias around the middle of the nineteenth century; there I could trace the annals of Kolel Reisin and Menahem’s role within it. Most of the material about the kolel comes from a book by Aharon Surasky—Yesud Ha’ma’alah: Divrei Hayamim Leyishuv Haharidim Be’eretz Israel about the history of the Hasidim in the country.⁸ Other data come from Montefiore’s censuses and records of his journeys, reports by other travelers, residents’ memoirs, family stories, and Sefer Teveria, already mentioned.

I knew Tiberias well as a child and I tried to picture my relatives living there a century earlier. How did they adjust to the city’s notoriously muggy, hot summers, having come from northern climes? How did they deal with their Arab neighbors or with Turkish officials without a language in common? I have no precise answers, only general information about daily life in Tiberias.

The 1839 Montefiore census recorded 695 Jews in Tiberias: 316 were Sephardim, the rest were Ashkenazim divided between Kolel Volhyn with 310 people, and Kolel Reisin with sixty nine. When asked by the census takers to describe their financial situation, some Jews said “average,” a few noted that they were “well-to-do,” and one Sephardi rabbi stated that he “used to be rich” before the earthquake. But most—perhaps because they were hoping for a contribution from Montefiore—declared themselves to be destitute, needy, barely eking out a living, subsisting on charity. Menahem, married but still childless, gave his family’s fiscal position as average, beinoni; his occupation was “studying the Torah.” Kolel Reisin was the only subgroup in the country whose exact monetary losses from the earthquake were noted, from five hundred to thirty thousand piasters per household or about $35 to $2,100. The damage suffered by Menahem was assessed at five thousand piasters. (The salary of the United States president in 1839 was $25,000, while the average price of a loaf of bread was under ten cents.)

Census of Kolel Reisin in Tiberias, 1855. Menahem Mendel’s name is third down on the right; Elte Leah is third down on the left.

Courtesy of the Montefiore Endowment, London

The census noted the individual occupation of most males. In Tiberias, among the Sephardim, were a baker, grocer, tinsmith, goldsmith, builder, painter, tailor, miller, donkey driver, a man “going around villages”—probably a peddler—and a number of religious scholars and synagogue officials. There was also a batlan, which literally means “idler,” but here it refers to someone living on alms whose duty it was to show up at the synagogue at prayer time in case he was needed to complete a minyan, the quorum of ten Jewish males. Among the city’s Ashkenazim, many in Kolel Volhyn did not seem to have a profession and presumably survived on the haluka—the welfare-like system that distributed money collected from Jews abroad. But some did work: wine merchants, carpenters, tailors, a tinsmith, and a translator were among the 106 adult males recorded, including scholars and rabbis. But in Kolel Reisin, the Russian kolel, each of the twenty-four adult males was either studying the Torah or teaching it. This was not because it was difficult to find work. Rather, it was a matter of ideology that differentiated that kolel from most other Jewish groups in the country. Its leaders in Russia expected the Hasidim in Eretz Israel to devote their lives to worshiping the Lord—to pray, study, and fulfill the mitzvot—and not to engage in worldly matters such as earning a living. Support was to come from their brethren abroad. Those European leaders even discouraged other Hasidim from immigrating to the Holy Land unless their purpose was study and worship.

As noted, Sir Moses Montefiore held the opposite view. Lady Judith wrote in her diary that “... the general opinion of those who know the Holy Land is that agriculture, when properly attended to, can be considered the best means of securing a useful and comfortable life to the poor who for religious motives may prefer that country to any other.” During their 1839 tour, on their way from Safed to Jerusalem, the couple stopped in Tiberias from May 27 to June 2. Their reputation preceded them and they were greeted like royalty; the Jewish community met them with song and dance, fifes and drums, and the city’s Turkish governor, “well mounted and armed,” joined the celebrants with his soldiers who skirmished up and down the sides of a mountain for the party’s amusement. The couple stayed at the house of the Sephardi rabbi, Haim Nissan Abulafia, a roomy and clean place “furnished in the Turkish style,” and there they met with representatives of the Jewish community and discussed Sir Moses’s ideas about land cultivation. The Montefiores worshiped at the Portuguese [Sephardi] Synagogue on Friday afternoon and “attended divine service in the German [Ashkenazi] Synagogue” on Saturday morning. That afternoon, “having attended service in the Russian [Kolel Reisin] place of worship, they visited the heads of the congregation.” Among them, I assume, was Menahem Mendel Epstein.⁹

At his request, Sir Moses was given a list of the Jews living in Tiberias, part of what was to become the first Montefiore census. He and his wife then spent one whole day—till ten at night—distributing money into “the hands of every man, woman, and child of the Hebrew, as well as of the Mussulman [Muslim] and Christian congregations.” On their way to and from Tiberias they had passed by olive and mulberry trees, “apparently many centuries old,” as well as almond and fig trees, prickly pears, and pomegranate bushes. In one place where the scenery was especially pleasing, Sir Moses observed, “... it might well have been termed, ‘a garden of Eden,’ a very Paradise.”¹⁰