Читать книгу In the Land of Israel: My Family 1809-1949 - Nitza Rosovsky - Страница 19

According to the 1855 Montefiore Census, my great-great-great-great-grandparents, Yoel and Sarah Rivke Hinde Ashkenazi, came to Safed from Teleneshti in 1853. Their grandson, Mordechai Mottel, would later marry Haya, daughter of Menachem and Leah Epstein. Yoel was a learned man, a ben Torah, and an official of Kolel Volhyn, which included some Hasidim from Bessarabia. I do not know what Yoel’s occupation was in Teleneshti, only that his father-in-law served as the head of the rabbinical court there (see Ashkenazi-Epstein family tree, above).

Teleneshti is a small town in Moldova, located in a region once known as Bessarabia. The country itself lies between the Dniester and Prut rivers, bordered by Ukraine and Romania. Documents from the early seventeenth century show that the Ottoman authorities, which ruled part of the country before 1812, invited Jewish and Armenian merchants from Poland, especially from the area of Lviv—where Hacham Zvi died—to come and resettle the countryside, which for centuries had been depleted by attacks from neighboring countries. A 1794 pinkas, or register, of the Jewish burial society in Teleneshti attested to the existence of an established community.¹⁴

Map of Moldova, c. 2007

Courtesy of d-maps.com

(http://d-maps.com/carte.php?lib=moldova_map&num_car=27000&lang=en)

Anti-Semitism was prevalent all over Europe, and Bessarabia, under the powerful influence of the Orthodox Church, was no exception. Throughout Eastern Europe Jews often found themselves in the position of middlemen, dealing with aristocratic landowners on one side, and serfs, peasants, and merchants on the other. While the local peasant could see “God’s will” in the feudal system that required him to work for the aristocracy and give up most of his crops, he looked upon the Jew as a “leech”—a moneylender, a tavern owner. Venomous sermons on Sundays reinforced the peasant’s hatred and made the Jew a convenient scapegoat. Yet there were no state-sponsored pogroms in Moldava during the eighteenth century, and edicts show that the civic authorities warned against persecuting the Jews who were helping develop the countryside. The landowners were interested in the skills the Jews brought with them and granted them land for building synagogues, houses of study, ritual baths, and cemeteries. Jews engaged in agriculture, raised cattle, grew fish in ponds, and distilled and sold alcohol. Some were artisans, wagoners, and innkeepers.

Teleneshti was situated in a heavily wooded area with oaks, birches, orchards, and vineyards. Every year merchants from surrounding countries descended upon the town to buy the produce of the fertile black earth—wheat, maize, barley, flax, tobacco, fruit, wine—so the citizens were aware of events in the outside world. Life was relatively secure for Jews in the countryside. Even after Bessarabia was annexed by Russia in 1812, it managed to maintain an autonomous status and was not affected by the tsar’s anti-Jewish legislation. But this began to change and by 1852 compulsory military service was imposed on Bessarabian Jews. This may have expedited the departure of the Ashkenazi family for the Holy Land. Six or seven other families from Teleneshti had settled in Safed in 1852 and 1853, according to the censuses.

Yoel died in 1855, followed by Sarah six years later. Their daughter Miriam had married Yitzhak whose last name was also Ashkenazi. According to the Humashim, they were buried in Safed but I am not sure about the sequence of events since I found their son, Mordechai Mottel, listed in the 1855 census under “Ashkenazi Orphans” in Safed. He was born in Teleneshti in 1840, arrived in Eretz Israel in 1852 and was the grandson of Yoel of Teleneshti.