Читать книгу In the Land of Israel: My Family 1809-1949 - Nitza Rosovsky - Страница 8

In the early 1980s, I twice went to visit the cemetery in Tiberias where I searched unsuccessfully for Mordechai Mottel Ashkenazi’s tomb. I tried again in 1989 after I learned the exact date of his death from the yortzeiten list.

Tiberias is situated on the western shore of the Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee. The cemetery lies between the lake on the east and a rocky basalt mountain range on the west. Lakeside frontage is at a premium and modern apartment buildings and hotels are rapidly encroaching upon the ancient burial grounds. The modern part of the cemetery is filled with elaborately carved headstones featuring doves and other creatures that presumably watch over the dead. (This is a Sephardi, rather than Ashkenazi, custom.) In the older part of the necropolis, simple stone slabs mark the graves. Many headstones were washed away during a flood in 1934, as were many of the city’s buildings and the archives of the Jewish community. A few years later, the Burial Society, Hevra Kadisha, whose written records vanished in the flood, numbered the remaining tombs and copied into new ledgers those inscriptions that were still legible. The deceased were listed alphabetically, mostly by first name and patronymic. Engraving last names on tombstones is a fairly recent custom.

At the small office of the Burial Society, located on the premises, I was courteously received once again by the elderly keeper; perhaps it is a relief to deal with the relatives of those who died long ago. I was asked, just as on my previous visits, if the family was of Sephardi or Ashkenazi origin, and the appropriate volume was produced. I did not find Mordechai Mottel. I found another Mordechai and another Yoel, both descendants of Hacham Zvi, but their dates did not fit. That reminded me that Mordechai Mottel’s son Yoel, my great-grandmother’s brother who used to feed me candy half a century earlier, was buried in Tiberias. The gentleman from the Burial Society pointed me in the right direction, and there was Yoel’s headstone, surrounded by tombs of other relatives. The inscription said: “Here is buried the wise rav of the stock [migeza] of Hacham Zvi, may his righteous memory be blessed. Our teacher Rav Yoel son of Rav Mordechai Ashkenazi of blessed memory, died on 23 Heshvan, Tasha”v [November 13, 1941]. May his soul be preserved among the living.” Having spent a lot of time trying to establish a link with Hacham Zvi, I was pleased to see the inscription on Yoel’s tomb, stating that he was a descendant of the Hacham.

As I stood there, on a clear November morning, I was swept by recollections of earlier times in the city. It is another crisp winter day in Tiberias, near the end of World War II. And there is my mother, in her early thirties, elegant, vivacious. We are sitting at the Lido Café, by the lake. An old family friend takes us in a private motorboat—a great luxury in those days—across the lake to his man-made fishponds, a new experiment. We continue from Tabkhah to Kfar Nahum, or Capernaum, where fallen pillars and capitals lie strewn by the water’s edge. Later that day I explore caves in the mountains with three of my distant cousins, the sons of Mordechai Cohen, great-grandsons of the Yoel Ashkenazi whose tomb I had just seen. On that day long ago we picked wild anemones and cyclamens, before it was politically incorrect, until we saw a jackal in the woods and ran back home. My mother pinned a few of the wild flowers to her lapel.

Gravestone of Yoel, son of Mordechai Mottel Ashkenazi, 1941

Gravestone of my great-great-great grandfather, Menahem Mendel, 1879

I laid a small stone on Yoel’s tomb in remembrance, as is the custom, and put to rest the shadows of the past. As I cast a final glance in the direction of the sparkling lake, over the older part of the cemetery which I had already explored, an inscription caught my attention, carved onto a tombstone which was slightly better preserved than the ones around it. On its side I could see the number assigned to it by the Burial Society, 1501. When I got closer I could actually read the inscription: “Menahem Mendel son of Mordechai, died on rosh hodesh Kislev, Taram. May his soul be preserved among the living.” Rosh hodesh means the beginning—the first two days—of the month. I was almost afraid to check the photocopied pages of the Humashim that I was carrying with me. But there it was, in Mordechai Mottel’s own handwriting: “The anniversary of my late father-in-law, Rav Menahem Mendel, son of Rav Mordechai of blessed memory, 2 Kislev, Taram [November 17, 1879], Tiberias.” So while I did not find Mordechai Mottel, I did come upon the grave of his father-in-law, my great-great-great-grandfather. Was it a mere accident? Even though Professor Israel Bartal of the Hebrew University, who is an expert on the history of the Jews of Palestine, told me that many Hasidim claimed a relationship to Hacham Zvi whether true or not—I must confess that finding Menahem Mendel’s final resting place and Hacham Zvi’s name on Yoel’s tomb seemed like an omen, a signal that I should persevere.