Snapshots in Time

In the beginning, there was a photograph. Taken at Nathan Halle’s bar mitzvah visit, it’s the only existing picture of his grandfather, the dayan. It shows Reb Shmuel leaning out of a window, and three chassidim conversing in the street below. One has his hat tipped forward at a jaunty angle, another clasps his hands behind his back — both characteristic poses that could appear in a photo taken in Williamsburg today.

The picture as it stands omits a central character: my grandfather. He was actually in the frame, but at some stage, he was cut out by someone else as the picture was trimmed. The act of carelessness erased what would surely have been a striking contrast of Berlin city boy and his holy Polish grandfather.

Together with the photo, and an image of his kever — destroyed during the Nazi occupation of Lizhensk — we knew a few basic facts about Reb Shmuel Yeshaya. He was born in 1854 in the town of Sanz — some 120 miles southwest of Lizhensk — and was appointed dayan in Lizhensk at the tender age of 23. His marriage to Shosha Teicher, daughter of a local family descended from Reb Meilech, brought him to live in the town.

Shmuel and Shosha Birnbaum had eight children: Gershon, Chaim, Yitzchok, Gittel, Sheindel, Yosef, Sure (Sara, my great-grandmother) and Elimelech. The children scattered far from Lizhensk, with some heading to Berlin and some eventually caught up in the Holocaust.

As senior dayan of the town, hints of Rav Shmuel’s standing in the region come in the form of teshuvos addressed to him from poskim in Galicia, notably Rav Shmuel Engel of Radomishla. Sanz origins notwithstanding, he was connected to Belz, traveling to the famous dynasty 90 miles to the east just over the border in what is today’s Ukraine. His position was also recognized officially by the local authorities, who granted him a stipend as a judge.

The approachability depicted in the photo of the dayan was a product of the fact that although the town had rabbanim, he was a mainstay of the town’s Jewish life. For decades until his passing at aged 84 (four years after the picture was taken) he acted as a mohel, shochet, maggid shiur, baal tokeia, and head of the chevra kaddisha.

And with that brief snapshot, the picture of our family origins in Lizhensk basically fades, leaving the proverbial more questions than answers.

Jews of the East

The next scene is in Berlin, also conjured into existence by a photograph. It’s of my grandfather, Nathan Halle, as a little boy in his class at the Adass Yisroel school in Berlin. A son of Yisroel Isser Halle – from a family of Belz chassidim originating in Nisko, 25 miles north of Lizhensk – and Sure Birnbaum, daughter of Lizhensk’s dayan, my grandfather was born in Berlin.

It was the search for a better life that had brought both parents, independently, to the city. Yisroel Isser was 16 when he came to the city with his parents, intending to travel to America. Sure was a bit older when she came to stay with her older brother Yitzchok.

The shidduch between the two came about through a telephone. Yisroel — a mohel and shochet who owned a poultry business — also possessed a phone. Sure often came into the store to make a call, and the rest was history, because after the couple married, she continued to help with the business, keeping the books with the fluent German that she’d picked up.

The couple’s home at 161a Schonhauser Allee is marked by stolpersteine – the so-called “stumbling stones” in the sidewalk across Berlin that commemorate the former homes of Holocaust victims.

Their apartment building, which survived the Russian assault on Berlin, is evidence of the couple’s prosperity. My grandfather Nathan Halle and his sister Suzy remembered a comfortable childhood. Their apartment had central heating, which was unusual for the time.

In some brief memories of prewar Jewish life that my grandfather wrote, he noted that it was the comparative comfort of Berlin life after Word War I that drew a mass influx of Polish Jews like his own family to the German capital.

“The economic conditions were harsh but they were harsh for everyone and Jews were not singled out. Jews were free to live their lives and while there was anti-Semitism this was endemic in Europe and as it was not state sponsored Jews were able to engage in commerce and the professions.

“These conditions contrasted greatly with those under which the Jews in Eastern Europe were living and this inevitably led to an influx of Jews from Poland who brought with them their more chassidic lifestyles. They opened Polish-stye chadorim and shtiblach to cater for the many and varied Chassidic strands.”

The heartland of chassidic life in Berlin was around the Grenadierstrasse, in the city’s north. Known today as the Almstadtstrasse, the road today gives no hint that once upon a time it looked like the main thoroughfares of New York’s Boro Park or London’s Stamford Hill.

There were 19 shtiblach in Grenadierstrasse alone, including at number 31 that of Radomsk, Stutchin, and Kalisch. The same building was also home to a cheder, the Etz Chaim Talmud Torah, founded in 1918.

Video footage from the era shows that the Grenadierstrasse would have been thoroughly at home in Eastern Europe, with very un-Germanic scenes everywhere. Visibly chassidic Jews abound, shops display Yiddish and Hebrew, and shuls and shtiblach peek out from many a doorway.

As a symbol of overt Jewishness, the street became an easy target for the Nazis in the early 1930s. A photograph from 1933 shows a police sweep of Grenadierstrasse as authorities moved early to check out the immigration status of foreigners.

The street was the center of the Scheunenviertel, the district which was the landing ground for Jewish immigrants. Like New York’s Lower East Side, Jews fresh off the train from Poland headed there, comforted by the familiar surroundings in an alien country.

To the established German Jews of the Tiergarten district in north-west Berlin, the newcomers around the Grenadierstrasse had a name: Ostjuden, or Jews of the east. The moniker wasn’t a compliment: it signaled the native Jewish unease with the perceived primitiveness of the newcomers. Their beards, their Yiddish, and their lack of Germanic polish. That tinge of disdain was not just the province of assimilated Jews — it extended to their Orthodox counterparts as well.

The rise of the Ostjuden began in the late-nineteenth century. With Berlin’s growing industries needing manpower, German authorities allowed Jews fleeing from the disintegrating Habsburg Empire and, later, the unrest triggered by the Russian Revolution, to settle in the city.

By 1910, Eastern European Jews constituted a population of 21,000 in Berlin. Such was the rate of immigration that a decade later, those numbers reached 44,000 — around a quarter of all Jews in Berlin.

On the Margins

A mile north of Grenadierstrasse, the Halle family’s home on Schönhauser Allee was firmly within the catchment area of the Ostjuden. Scattered memories from both my grandfather and his sister shed some light on life as children of immigrants from the east.

Young Nathan Halle went to the Adass Yisroel school system, beginning with elementary school at the Neue Schönhauser Strasse, a mile away. This was a yekkish school, part of the Adass Yisroel community under the leadership of Rabbi Ezra Munk, a nephew of Rav Ezriel Hildesheimer, who had founded the community. The sprawling network of institutions contained the entire gamut of community functions: schools, shuls, a hospital and burial ground. Adass Yisroel served a sixth of Berlin’s Jewish population.

Like his contemporary Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch, Rav Hildesheimer was an advocate of the Torah im derech eretz combination of Torah life with secular excellence, and this was the spirit that underlay the Adass and its schools.

But while Nathan and his sister Susi Rothman (named after her grandmother Shosh Birnbaum, the Lizhensk dayan’s rebbetzin) were growing up as German children, they clearly had a sense of being outsiders.

“It was not the school our father would have chosen (they were are all Yekkehs),” she wrote in some memories published after my grandfather’s passing. “But it was the only Orthodox school, and all the children were shomer Shabbos.”

The grounds for dissatisfaction with the Adass schooling were presumably the shortfall in Torah learning vis-à-vis what was customary back home in Eastern Europe — a deficiency that had to be supplemented with private lessons.

“Our father was a very learned man, and he learned with Nathan,” she recalled. “He also had a melamed, a stocky man with a long ginger beard. The first thing he taught Nathan was to make Kiddush.”

In addition, Nathan was sent to cheder on Sunday morning, where the teaching — in a chassidish pronunciation — was obviously not up to scratch, with humorous results. Learning Mishnayos Gittin, he walked away with the impression that the rebbi’s oft-repeated references to a “grisha” meant a Greek woman, instead of a divorcee.

In general, once the Nazis came to power and ejected Jews from the professions, schools were swamped with new, inexperienced teachers, leading to a breakdown in classroom discipline.

Naturally, the children took advantage of the newcomers, testing their patience by throwing lumps of coal at the radiators when the teachers turned their backs.

All in all though, my grandfather had a pleasant childhood. Just 11 years old when the Nazis came to power in 1933, life in Berlin was basically good, he recalled. “I remember as a young boy hearing people referring to Berlin as Yerushalayim! — sadly mistaken, as things turned out.”

Café Culture

At the root of those happy memories was the fact that the Halle family in Berlin was part of a wider clan — the Birnbaums of Lizhensk. Five of Reb Shmuel Dayan’s eight children immigrated to the German capital in the early part of the 20th century.

Three were sons — Chaim, Yitzchok, Yosef, and the youngest, Elimelech. Sure — my great-grandmother — was the only daughter to do so. (The oldest son, Gershon, had moved to America; a daughter Gittel Gutfreund moved to Antwerp, Belgium; and another daughter Sheindel lived in Lizhensk.)

When researching this piece, I discovered the existence of a third cousin who lived a few minutes away from me in Beit Shemesh. Yitzchok Birnbaum — named after his great-grandfather, the dayan’s son — was able to fill in gaps about the Birnbaum tribe living in Berlin.

The original Yitzchok had come to Berlin with his wife and children in 1911, from Sanz, where he’d moved after marriage. A photo from 1920 shows that despite his new environment, the dayan’s son maintained his chassidic appearance, including a full beard.

Yitzchok and his wife Lieba (later Ahuva, when they moved to Eretz Yisrael) opened a grocery store in Berlin, and later switched to run a café in the Grenadierstrasse whose menu featured dairy dishes, including kugel. Both Yitzchok and another brother, Chaim, were gabbaim of their shtibel, which was behind Yitzchok’s house and café.

Given that location, the businesses of coffee and shul merged on a pro bono basis. Many of the mispallelim walked a long distance to the shtibel, and so they stopped at Yitzchok Birnbaum’s home to warm up with a cup of coffee before davening. That custom became such an institution that one shul-goer became irate when he had to wait a few minutes. Waiting for the host to return from the mikveh before davening, he built up a head of steam by the time Yitzchok returned.

“If you give a Jew a coffee in the morning,” he fumed, “do you need to make him wait outside as well?!”

After the rise of the Nazis, the coffee house was the direct trigger for that branch of the Birnbaum family to leave Germany. Not long after Hitler came to power, a group of uniformed Nazi thugs assaulted Yitzchok in his café. They poured salt and pepper all over him, and shaved half of his beard off to humiliate him. Shocked, he and his wife decided to leave for Eretz Yisrael.

In Tel Aviv, they reopened the Birnbaum café, but after a few years sold it. It still exists, a century later as Café Birenbaum, a kosher dairy restaurant, next to the city’s iconic Carmel Market.

Back before the rise of the Nazis, the café was the meeting place of the wider Birnbaum clan. On Shabbos morning, they would get together for a coffee and slice of lekach cake. And come Motzaei Shabbos, they would preserve a link to their famous ancestor by sitting down to learn through his teachings in Noam Elimelech.

Distant Wonder

Those convivial Shabbos mornings included another branch of the family. Chaim Birnbaum was a talmid chacham who was expected to take over from his father Reb Shmuel Yeshaya in Lizhensk. But after a few years of married life in Lancut, a small town near Lizhensk, he and his wife Itta decided to move to Berlin. Like their other siblings, they moved into the heart of the chassidish area, settling in Dragonerstrasse, near the Grenadierstrasse.

If Yitzchok supplied the coffee and cake for their shtibel, Chaim provided the herring for the members.

Inevitably, the second generation of the Birnbaums acclimated to the new environs by shedding their chassidic exterior. A family memoir from Chaim’s son, Yehoshua Heshel, traces that evolution. Heshel himself wore a gartel, but when the family moved out of the Grenadierstrasse ghetto, into the Tiergarten area — beards and sheitels stayed behind.

Nevertheless, the more modern offspring loved to come back to the alte heim for Shabbos. The memoir records the “unique and mysterious atmosphere of holiness” that spread through Chaim and Itta Birnbaum’s Berlin apartment. As the learned son of Lizhensk’s dayan, Chaim became the focal point as friends and relatives would assemble in the kitchen to hear him give a shiur. Lulled by the warmth and fragrances, someone would inevitably nod off.

As Shabbos ended, Itta Birnbaum would sit at the window with visiting grandchildren, singing “Gott fun Avraham” and checking for three stars.

Evidence of the family’s ongoing connection with their roots in Poland comes via a remarkable story — a full-blown moifes, really — that took place in 1935.

By that time, life in Berlin had become a source of daily terror for the city’s Jews. Men were beaten in the streets, and children were attacked by Hitler Youth. Yosef Birnbaum, another of the dayan’s sons, had his beard pulled out and was then shipped off to a concentration camp.

But on that occasion, the close call came not from the Nazi Brownshirts but from something far more prosaic.

Heshel Birnbaum’s wife Henni-Gittel was out visiting her parents, and Heshel himself had put the children to sleep. Checking on them before he retired for the night, he noticed that the children seemed more deeply asleep than normal.

Sometime later, he was wakened by a strange, vivid dream. It was his grandfather, the dayan who was still alive in Lizhensk who appeared to him with a command: “Open the front door,” the dayan instructed.

Others might have dismissed the dream as nonsense, but Heshel Birnbaum didn’t. He opened the heavy front door, expecting to find someone there, but the corridor was empty, and so he went back to sleep.

Not for long. Twice more, his grandfather commanded him to open the door, and twice more Heshel checked what was outside. After the third time, he heard his sleeping son breathing deeply, and on checking noticed that he seemed very groggy. Another child woke up, and on the way to the bathroom, fainted.

Realizing that something was terribly wrong, Hershel managed to open the front door, phone his parents and the family doctor, and then blacked out.

The physician arrived, smelled gas, and realized that there had been a leak. The children were rushed to the hospital, and after a few days, made a full recovery.

Notable was Heshel’s response to their miraculous rescue, which had come about through the grandfather living in the town of their saintly ancestor. After saying Hagomel, he added a name to that of Tzvi, the son who was the closest to death in the gas leak incident.

The name that he added was Elimelech.

Worlds Apart

Five hundred miles separate Berlin and Lizhensk, today traversable in eight hours by the modern A4 highway that travels east-west across Poland. In the prewar era, it wasn’t just the transport difficulties that separated the two places, but a chasmic difference in culture.

Over the years, the Birnbaum family bridged the gap by traveling in both directions. With so many of his children living in Berlin, Reb Shmuel Yeshaya visited the city in 1922, presumably both proud to see his religious children and worried about their future, so far from chassidic Poland.

Besides that one visit, the traffic was all the other way as the dayan’s sons visited, bringing their German-raised children with them for a return to the old world.

That was the background to my grandfather Nathan Halle’s 1935 bar mitzvah trip and his encounter with the local fish market turbulence. The town that he encountered was steeped in Jewish lore. The first Jewish presence in the area dated back to the 1500s, as the Spanish Expulsion generated a vast Jewish migration that reached Poland.

In 1765, during the lifetime of the Noam Elimelech, a census registered 909 Jewish taxpayers. Despite repeated invasions of the area by the Tartars and Swedes, wars between local Polish nobles, and periodic cholera outbreaks, the town regenerated and both the general and Jewish population climbed.

In 1884, Lizhensk numbered 8,594 people, among them 1,985 Jews, who were employed as merchants, traders, and leasers of the proverbial kretshme, or tavern. Jews settled mostly in the city square that greets visitors to the town to this day.

That was the Lizhensk that a ten-year-old Nathan Halle found when he arrived. At my own brother’s bar mitzvah 65 years later, he noted the disparity between the two events.

“Bar mitzvahs in those days were celebrated somewhat differently from the way things are done in these days,” he observed in his low-key way. “My 13th birthday occurred on a Monday, when I began to put on tefillin, and when I was called up to the Torah for the first time — and that was it.”

The herring and schnapps that were served in the Lizhensk shul that morning in 1935 were as fancy as things got — but there were no leniencies when it came to speaking.

“I had been taught a pshetl, which I had memorized and which I declaimed in the shul much to the amazement of the kehillah,” my grandfather remembered. “Coming from Berlin, I was dressed in the German fashion, but spoke Yiddish and gave a Talmudical discourse — the people in the shul just did not know what to make of me.”

More than anything, that image of a boy dressed in a modern style but speaking Yiddish highlights the gulf between the two worlds, and the way that the Birnbaum family tried to straddle both.

Whatever Reb Shmuel Yeshaya’s flock thought of this particular German grandson, they had a chance to reflect further on the vagaries of the younger generation on another visit.

It turns out that Yitzchok Birnbaum, café maestro of the Grenadierstrasse, took along his sons on an extended visit that yielded far more details about that long-lost Lizhensk.

Yitzchok would visit his father the dayan every year, but due to expense would leave his family at home. One year, though, it was his son’s bar mitzvah, and so he decided to take the boy and his 12-year-old brother Shlomo along for a visit to his hometown. The latter recorded his impressions of the visit that lasted for a few weeks, including Rosh Hashanah.

Stopping at Breslau (then Germany, now called Wroclaw in Poland), the boys’ first thought was one of shock at crossing into such a primitive place.

“After crossing the border, Polish officers with kaskets got on. We were in shock — Germans thought that Poland was a primitive land. We used to say that ghosts and demons still lurk there. We didn’t understand the language — we were struck dumb.”

The train from Germany to Galicia takes a west-east route through Kattowitz, Krakow, Tarnow, Rseszow (known to Jews as Reisha), and Pshevorsk — names redolent of Jewish history.

The next stage was changing trains for Lizhensk, followed by horse and cart on to its Jewish area.

“To us children, it looked like the Middle Ages,” remembered Shlomo Birnbaum, my grandfather’s first cousin. “There was no electricity, people cooked on primus or wood-burning stoves, water was borne by water carrier, the roads were mud-paved, and there was no bath except for the mikveh.”

The mostly wooden town — a constant fire hazard — surrounded the square that still houses the municipality. Since nobody owned a watch, locals used city hall’s clock tower to tell the time. Jews called the local feature “der shtotzeiger” — the town clock.

And of course there was the young boy’s grandfather the dayan, known as Reb Shmuel Tchitcher, to set him apart from Shmuel Vassertreger — the water carrier.

“We visited when he was already 80-years old,” Shlomo recalled. “I sat there for days in his house listening to his psakim. One day, people asked him to locate a kever to put the matzeivah on. Using his knowledge of the area, he located it and then said, ‘Even if I’m wrong, all Jews have a cheilek in Olam Haba.’ ”

One fact that impressed his young grandson was that the aged dayan was so well-regarded in the town that local non-Jews in a legal battle with a Jew agreed to go in front of Reb Shmuel for adjudication.

Those family records are supplemented by the voices of Lizhensk old-timers, preserved in the town’s Yizkor book. One of many hundreds that were written by former residents of villages and towns across Eastern Europe after the Holocaust, Lizhensk’s contained sketches of town life, including the crowds who flocked to the Noam Elimelech’s yahrtzeit — and a few details about the dayan.

“Reb Shmuel Dayan, who was known to all as Reb Shmuel Tchitcher, was so connected to the Jewish landscape of Lizhensk that it is impossible to describe Jewish life and the large beis medrash without him,” recalled one Dovid Steinbach.

“He was a tall man with a flowing white beard. He was filled with Torah, wisdom, modesty, and love of his fellow Jew. He knew how to argue over the tip of a yud, while at the same time not being too extreme. He was able to shout ‘sheigetz’ at the youth, while at the same time wear a smile that brought hearts near, for he would push away with his right and draw near with his left.”

Like many towns in Eastern Europe where the position of dayan was separate from that of rabbi, Lizhensk’s rabbinate was held for many years by a Belzer chassid, Rav Yechezkel Segal Landau. In parallel, minor rebbes were active each with their own shtibel, including various descendants of the Noam Elimelech

But indisputably, the dayan was a central figure for many decades. As the Yizkor Book records, he was armed with a ready smile — a handy tool for the father figure of the town. “All of the people of Lizhensk loved him and honored him. He mediated between disputants in political and factional affairs. He was always able to calm people down, and he won people over with his hearty laugh.”

Final Messages

As the second half of the 1930s went on, and the ground began to burn under the feet of German Jews, it became clear to many of the Berlin Birnbaums that their sojourn in their adopted land was ending.

The children of Yitzchok and Ahuva Birnbaum began emigrating to Eretz Yisrael from 1934. Chaim and Itta’s son Heshel and their family fled to Holland, where they were caught up in the Nazi dragnet. They went on to survive Bergen-Belsen as a family.

The wife and children of Yosef, another son, left Berlin in early 1938 to Eretz Yisrael, and with them they took a parting gift: siddurim with inscriptions for two of the sons’ bar mitzvahs.

They were inscribed with a parting message from their grandfather, who was niftar not long after on the second day of Pesach 1938.

The Yiddish inscription read: “My precious grandson Heshel, I am sending you a siddur. You should be an erlicher Yid, and know that you are an einekel of the Rebbe Reb Meilech. From me, your zeide, Shmuel Yeshaya Birnbaum, dayan.”

The words were the final will and spiritual tzavaah of a loving grandfather who’d seen his descendants grow in a foreign land, and wanted to steel them for trials ahead.

My own grandfather was similarly cast out into the unknown.

Speaking at a family simchah, my grandfather said: “I myself did not witness the horrors of the Kristallnacht, as by that time my father and I were in prison in Danzig, where we had traveled after being deported to Poland in the so-called ‘Polenaktion’ on the 28th of October, 1938.

“At that point the Germans forcibly transported Jews with Polish nationality over the border into Poland. My aunt who lived in Danzig was able to bribe the warders to let us out of prison so that we could smuggle ourselves over the border back to Poland, from where I was able to travel to England. My father was later permitted to travel to Berlin to wind up his business, and while there, he sent most of the household goods to London in the hope that he would be able to follow.”

But Yisroel Isser and Sure Halle were never to taste freedom. They were deported to Vilna, and eventually murdered. My grandfather Nathan Halle escaped to England as a 17-year-old, where he suffered privation as a penniless refugee. Eventually, he established himself in London’s Golders Green community, and married my grandmother Ruth Gutmann, a native of Breslau.

Ringing in his hears was his own father’s last words, in May 1939 in the Krakow railway station — similarly, an emotional plea in mixed German-Yiddish to remember his roots.

“Vergess nischt as du bist a Jied — don’t forget that you’re a Jew,” were his last words.

Rebbe of Rebbes

“Can you read that?” The words from my neighbor in the LOT Polish Airlines flight to Warsaw jolt me out of my immersion in Noam Elimelech, the sefer that has stood on my shelf since my bar mitzvah and that I’m only now attempting to decipher.

My seatmate is called Yossi, a mehadrin-level secular Israeli. A businessman from Ramat Gan, his interest is piqued by my ability to read Rashi script, despite the fact that my native tongue is clearly English.

The normal conversation about chareidim, work, and the army ensues — with a twist. He’s fascinated by my roots journey to Lizhensk, about the sefer and its author.

“So, is it commentary on the Torah?” he asks.

It’s something that I want to understand better myself. It’s been weeks of reading about the family history, and about Reb Meilech himself. Along the way, I’ve discovered a range of third cousins, including a Tel Aviv university lecturer and a rebbi in a cheder. I’ve met the Lizhensker Rebbe of Ramat Beit Shemesh — a genuine member of a genuine dynasty stretching back generations.

Finally, I’ve spent some time trying to make headway in the famous sefer where for our family, it all began. Compiled by Rav Elazar — son of Rav Elimelech himself — who wrote down his father’s words after they were said on Shabbos, it’s immediately clear that the ideas discuss a lofty form of avodah.

The columns are littered with references to the tzaddik, his function and service of Hashem. It’s clear why the Baal HaTanya — first Rebbe of Chabad — called Noam Elimelech “sifran shel tzaddikim.”

A disciple of the Maggid of Mezritch, himself a follower of the Baal Shem Tov, Rav Elimelech — who was drawn to chassidus by his brother, Reb Zusha — was known as the “Rebbe of Rebbes.” That’s first a reference to the fact that he was the rebbe of many chassidic masters, including the Chozeh of Lublin, the Kozhnitzer Maggid, and Rav Menachem Mendel of Rimanov.

But it’s also because he developed the doctrine of the Rebbe as a pathway for serving Hashem.

The asterisks famously printed throughout the work are part of the sefer’s mystique. Theories abound as to what they are; according to some, they represent moments when the author received a revelation from Eliyahu Hanavi. Whatever the explanation, the stars are sacrosanct — a part of the sefer itself.

Along with the loftiness though, some pieces are clear in their pathway for serving Hashem. Take a small segment commenting on the pasuk “Ta’amu u’re’u ki tov Hashem — taste and see that Hashem is good,” and according to Reb Meilech dealing with elevating the material aspect of our world.

“A person is not permitted to benefit from this world, both through eating and drinking, and through vision, which represents man’s main drives… if so, a person needs to ensure that all that he sees should only be concerned with Hashem’s loftiness, to see His wonders. Thus, all that a person ‘tastes,’ and that he ‘sees,’ should only be to understand that ‘Hashem is good’ (Likkutei Shoshanah, 54).

That short idea — both a demand and a pathway to achieving it — encapsulates the lofty nature of the Noam Elimelech, balanced with its practicality.

That’s some of what I try to convey to my secular seatmate, Yossi, to explain why the plane is full of pilgrims, and what was unique about this particular Polish rabbi.

Yossi in turn, is amazed by what happens next.

Seeing my open copy of Noam Elimelech, a man wearing jeans and a little kippah comes up to me and demands, “Are you also going to Lizhensk?”

Before I have a chance to reply, Yossi begins a conversation over my head with the newcomer, Eyal from Netanya.

“You? What are you doing here? I understand why the chareidim are flying off, but you’re one of ours! What are you going for?”

It turns out that Eyal — of mixed Moroccan-Aleppo ancestry — heard some Torah from Reb Meilech at a shiur a few years ago, and was drawn to come to the Polish countryside ever since.

“It’s a neshamah thing, I feel connected,” he explains to Yossi. “You have to come and try it yourself.”

Tough Love

Connection is how I’d describe seeing Lezajsk — the Polish form of Lizhensk — for the first time. That’s not to lay claim to any great metaphysical feeling. It’s just that this one little dot on the great map of Poland has lurked in my subconscious for decades — and suddenly, here it is.

Dropped off by the Ukrainian Uber driver in the town square, I look up, and there is a piece of history. Adorning the municipality building that dominates the square is the clock tower — the shtotzeiger of old.

Around the square — where many Jewish homes and businesses stood — are still homes and businesses, all owned by Poles.

It’s not far to the tziyun of the Noam Elimelech, but first it’s time for family history. My newly found cousin Yitzchok Birnbaum — the cheder rebbi from Beit Shemesh — told me that the house of the dayan and his shtibel next door still stand.

Coordinates in hand, I head a couple of streets over. Along the way are plenty of late-registration cars, some on the high end. It’s evident that this town long ago escaped shtetldom. The rising tide of the booming Polish economy has lifted the local boats. It can’t hurt as well that Jews everywhere continue to pump money into the town’s coffers.

And suddenly, there it is. Unmistakably, the house in which Reb Shmuel stood, looking out of the window, as the three chassidim talk.

Its dusty windows and junk-strewn interior are testament to having lain empty for a while. Aside from some new ornamentation on the window casing, decorative grooves that have disappeared from the building’s façade, and a raised sidewalk, it all fits. The large windows line up with the basement windows.

Next door, painted a garish yellow, is what’s thought to be the dayan’s shtibel. Its faded sign proclaims that it’s a sporting goods store of some kind, although it too looks derelict.

Looking at the two buildings, it’s hard not to shiver at the sense of timelessness, and a circle closing.

A fragment from Lizhensk’s Yizkor Book that discusses this building comes to mind, conveying the battle of tradition and modernity that raged in this small town when my grandfather visited.

It seems that the other half of the building that Reb Shmuel the dayan rented, was used for another purpose: as a Zionist youth club.

In the wake of the First World War and the Communist revolution, new ideas began to penetrate the pious precincts of Lizhensk. In 1918, a workers’ union was founded in Lizhensk by the name of “Poale Zion,” including a beis medrash for workers, as well as a library. This latter was presumably a secular institution, and it was supplemented in 1928 when a Communist library was opened.

The proliferation of men titled “Dr.” between the world wars, and listed in the Yizkor Book, also point to the bourgeois secularization of the town.

Tradition has it that when reports reached the Shineve Rav, famed son of the Divrei Chaim of Sanz, of the deterioration in the Lizhensk youth, he refused to believe the news. Looking heavenward, he exclaimed, “It can’t be! In Lizhensk, the very himmel is soaked with Jewish tears!”

This was the background to the confrontation between the venerable dayan and his neighbors. Next door was a Zionist group led by a young firebrand named Chanina Glicksman.

Many young people would pack whatever venue Chanina was able to find, and eventually he set up a library in a room that he rented on the other side of the wall from Reb Shmuel Tchitcher.

There the aspiring Zionists gathered, to discuss literature, sing, dance, and debate. It got to the point where the dayan couldn’t tolerate what was happening on the other side of his wall, and he shouted at the organizers, “Shkotzim! Shikses!”

Fearing that their venue would be confiscated under the dayan’s influence, the leaders sought to placate him. They brought Reb Shmuel to the library, showed him what they were up to, and came to an agreement with him.

He agreed to sanction their meetings, with one condition: the boys and girls shouldn’t go out as couples afterward. This anecdote — mentioned a number of times in the memories of the town, illustrates the dayan’s wise stewardship of an evolving, painful situation, and the changing religious dynamics as the closed shtetl of old gave way to modernity.

At the same time, the story of Chanina Glicksman’s innovations serves to illustrate the limits of secularism in a town with such deep roots of piety. The young leader organized a theatrical group and began to stage performances — but there was one hindrance on their success. Women refused to act, and so men needed to play their parts as well.

Old Meets New

If a visitor to the yahrtzeit of the Noam Elimelech washed up from the distant past, he might conclude that not much has changed. True, there’s all the fanfare of the modern world: blasting music, tour companies operating control rooms, hachnassas orchim hotels, and endless free food.

But those are only the externals. Inside and around the tziyun, not much has changed. Eyes shut, deep in prayer, and with many tears, the davening around the ohel is awe-inspiring. This isn’t fake — people really connect.

In chassidic tradition, this isn’t one of many kevarim — it’s of a different nature. The Tiferes Shlomo of Radomsk — an early 19th century chassidic master — was particularly drawn to the Noam Elimelech, saying that the great tzaddik himself blessed anyone who came to the kever on his yahrtzeit.

Standing at the grave of my ancestor, I feel that connection as well — something deeper, something beyond the average. This is not one of many tzaddikim whose graves dot the landscape — it’s my zeide.

The ancient graveyard of Lizhensk was stripped of most of its headstones in the German occupation, leaving a few short rows of lichen-encrusted matzeivos.

As the multihued crowd streams into the small building housing the famed kever — chassidim of all types, Sephardim, Litvaks, from Israel, the US and Europe — a description of the prewar yahrtzeit comes to mind.

It’s from Rav Uri Weisblum, a leading mashgiach and talmid of Rav Shlomo Wolbe, who happens to be a direct descendant of the Noam Elimelech, bearing his family name. His father, Rav Yaakov Yitzchak, was one of Haifa’s rabbanim, who had been to the gathering in Lizhensk before the war.

“In those years, thousands of people would come to honor the hilula,” Rav Weisblum recalled. “My father met there a group of students from Breslov. He also said that in that year, a Jew from Hungary arrived, and as he stood at the tziyun, he grabbed his white beard and exclaimed: ‘Rebbi! You promised that whoever came to the kever wouldn’t depart this world without teshuvah; and here I am, already old, and I have not yet repented,’ and he burst into bitter tears.”

Those same hopes and tears — hoped and cried for two centuries — are as evident now as they would have been in times past.

Stones Unturned

While the sun dips over the ancient graveyard, and the crowds grow as the yahrtzeit is ushered in, I have one more task. Behind the tziyun, my newfound cousin tells me, is the latest discovery in the unfolding story of Reb Shmuel Yeshaya Birnbaum.

A few months ago, while renovating the town’s square, former matzeivos that had been ripped up during the Nazi occupation of Lizhensk, were discovered under the paving.

They are now piled up in the beis olam, awaiting a decision on what to do with them. Heavy slabs of masonry in various states of repair, the top ones are legible but too heavy to move.

I climb in between the piles, but can’t locate the text familiar from our family photograph. It may be under there, but that will have to wait another day.

In the meantime, the best form of matzeivah exists in his descendants — those who continue to follow in the footsteps of the old dayan and the legendary tzaddik who are buried feet away from each other.

In my grandfather — on whose consciousness was seared the message of Lizhensk from that one brief visit — they certainly had a worthy follower.

That’s why my quiet Zeidi — as we called him — a man of few, yet substantial words, decided to finish off the speech that he gave at my brother’s bar mitzvah with words of his ancestor.

“To attain absolute faith in Hashem is one of the most difficult goals that one can set oneself and it is impossible for us to know who possesses such an elevated level of faith. The Torah testifies to only one human being as having been possessed of such faith — Avraham Avinu,” he quoted from the Noam Elimelech.

It was the leitmotif of a life lived between two worlds — a Yekkeh and Ostjude, feet in the modern world and head in that of his saintly forbear.

“Make every effort to increase your faith in Hashem,” he said, concluding with his own words that harked back centuries, “for its attainment is sure to give you menuchas hanefesh and a happy state of mind.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1057)