A holy ancestor’s photo sparked a roots journey across time and space

Photos: Eli Cobin, Birnbaum Family Archives, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Bundesarchiv

By Gedalia Guttentag, Leżajsk

INsummer 1935, a boy named Nathan boarded the train in Berlin and traveled east to celebrate his bar mitzvah with his grandfather, in the land of a thousand shtetls.

The sleepy Polish town that was his destination was no ordinary one. It was Lizhensk, the storied home of the early chassidic master, Rav Elimelech Weisblum, known to posterity by the name of his work, Noam Elimelech.

Young Nathan’s grandfather was also no ordinary zeide. He was Rav Shmuel Yeshaya Birnbaum, the town’s beloved dayan. A descendant of Reb Meilech, as the chassidim call the legendary rebbe, and married to a granddaughter of the Noam Elimelech, he was known interchangeably as Reb Shmuel Dayan, or Reb Shmuel Tchitcher, after his birthplace. For a full six decades until his passing in 1938, he paskened sh’eilos, settled disputes, and served as mohel for generations of Lizhensk boys.

So, when a crisis hit the town on Erev Shabbos of the bar mitzvah, it was to the tall, saintly looking dayan that the townspeople turned. The emergency in question involved fish, the price of which had soared, making the Shabbos staple unaffordable for the struggling locals.

Reb Shmuel didn’t hesitate. Summoning the shammes, he headed for the shul in the town center. The sight of the dayan and the shammes striding to shul in the middle of the day indicated that something official was afoot, and so naturally a crowd gathered to find out what was going on.

The dayan ascended the steps to the bimah, knocked three times, and made a dramatic announcement. “Whoever cooks fish bought at the high prices will make his pots and pans treif!”

Such was the power of Reb Shmuel Dayan in his fiefdom that within minutes, the price of fish dropped to its normal level.

For me, that story is as synonymous with the town of Lizhensk as the Noam Elimelech himself. Because the bar mitzvah boy in question was my grandfather Nathan (pronounced “Natan,” or sometimes “Nassan”) Halle, who fled Germany for England as the curtain came down on European Jewry. And the story of rabbinical power that he witnessed is a tantalizing glimpse into what we loosely call “the shtetl” — the vanished world that birthed ours, and on whose threshold he stood as a young boy.

Ninety years after the fluctuations in its fish market, I find myself standing under the crisp, blue skies of springtime Lizhensk. It’s a few hours before the onset of the 21st of Adar, the Noam Elimelech’s yahrtzeit. Already, thousands of visitors mob this small town. Music pulses through the air. The tziyun is full of Jews passionately pouring their hearts out in prayer, and the hachnassas orchim industry is in full swing. Locals ferry the visitors around, and a brisk trade swells the coffers of Lezajsk, as the town is known in Polish.

Unlike for many of the visitors, this is my first encounter with the yahrtzeit. It’s an intensely personal one, because it’s not only about tefillah, but also about roots. Growing up in ’90s England, Hirschianism was the DNA of my chinuch. It was in the high school I attended in Manchester, it was in the references to “Torah im derech eretz” that we grew up with at home, and it was in the air of Munk’s shul where my grandfather davened in London.

But ever-present — like a computer program running in the background — was the knowledge that my yekkish grandfather had been connected to something different. The world of his grandfather, where being a descendant of the Noam Elimelech meant something. A world called Lizhensk.

What was that world? That was not just a question, but an almost blank slate.

I knew precious little about the family story. Like many of their generation who fled impoverished Galicia a century ago, the dayan’s eight children had moved, some to Berlin.

What had Reb Shmuel thought of his children stepping into the modern world? How had they lived once they got there — determined to preserve the world of their saintly ancestor, or bent on Westernizing?

Then there was the world they’d left behind, home to a chain stretching back two centuries. Was there any way to shed light on Lizhensk as a real place, not merely the home to a legend?

Finally, the mysterious figure of the Noam Elimelech himself, whose work adorns many shelves, often as a segulah. What was it that gave the “Rebbe of Rebbes,” as he was called, such a unique place in the pantheon of chassidus; that led generations of Jews in a ceaseless, holy tramp to my ancestral hometown?

Rav Elimelech, ironically, would have been the last to approve of yichus-hunting for its own sake. “A person should humble himself not to be haughty if he’s from a family of lineage,” he wrote. “Rather he should think that in serving the Creator, their merit stands for him and his descendants.”

Somewhere along my journey, though, it occurred to me that the form of yichus that I’m in search of is not so much an object of pride as the discovery of a pathway.

Like an infinitely delicate pipeline, connecting generation after generation, one era to another, lineage is a wondrous aperture through which to gaze through time. In my case, into the long-buried past of my shtetl, Lizhensk.