This is an article about the methodology I used in an attempt to prove (or disprove) a family tale of connection to a famous rabbi, the Ciechanower rebbe. It revolves around my grandfather, Simon Landau, who was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1868 and immigrated to South Africa in the 1890s. In December 1904, his wife and three young children also immigrated to South Africa. My father was born a few years later in Montagu, a small farming town in the old Cape Colony on February 29, 1908. Six years later, the family moved to Cape Town, where Simon lived the rest of his life. He died in April 1936, a year before my parents married.

I knew little about my grandfather, and my father did not speak much about him. That changed in 1969, when an American couple, Helen and Sam Poplack, came to South Africa to visit. Helen’s late father was Rabbi Raphael Victor Landau from Boston. My father had first met Helen and her family in the 1930s when he came to the United States on a medical research scholarship. When his ship, the Berengaria, pulled into New York harbor, he heard an announcement that someone was there to meet him. The man who greeted him had come all the way in his car from Boston and identified himself as Rabbi Raphael Victor Landau, explaining that they were first cousins.

Unbeknown to my father, Simon Landau had an older brother, Isaac Landau, who had immigrated to America with his wife and children from Lodz in about 1906. Raphael was the eldest son of Isaac Landau and had served for many years as a rabbi in Fiume, Italy. Raphael and his wife and family (including his youngest daughter Helen) immigrated to the United States in the 1920s. After first serving as a rabbi in New Hampshire, he later settled in Brookline, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. He died in Boston in the early 1950s.

Finding Simon Landau’s Family Roots

I had always been told that my grandfather Simon and his wife, Helena, came from Lask, Poland. The first big surprise came when I found Simon Landau’s application for residency in the Cape Colony in 1902. (At that time, the British had control of two major colonies in South Africa—the Cape Colony and Natal. This was prior to the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910.) Copies of these applications for residency can be found at the South African archives. Some of these applications have also been filmed by the Mormons. The form asked where the applicant had been born. Instead of Lodz or Lask, there was a difficult-to-read word that looked like Jerof. After checking Mokotoff and Sack’s Where Once we Walked, I found Jerof was an alternate spelling of Jezow, part of greater Lodz.

The Mormon films for Jezow yielded Simon’s birth record together with his older siblings, including Isaac Landau. I discovered that Simon Landau had a twin sister named Marya, who died after a few years. I also recognized the name of an older sister, Pessa Gitta. My father had told me that she had married a Mr. Szlamowitz, who worked for the Wisotsky tea company from Lodz, as their representative in London, England. In England, the family changed its surname to Shaw. My father had frequent contact with Pessa Gitta’s grandson, Phil Shaw, who became a successful businessman and highly regarded philanthropist in England. The other siblings’ names all were unknown to me.

Also in the Mormon films, I found an 1842 wedding certificate from Jezow for Simon’s parents, Fishel Landau and Mindel Weinberger, who was the daughter of the rabbi of the town, Szlama Weinberger. Fishel’s parents on the marriage document were listed as Szymon and Golda Landau. Now I knew who Simon was named after.

Next I consulted the entry for Jezow in Pinkas HaKehillot Polin and learned that Szlama Weinberger had served as the rabbi in Jezow for many years. In 1879, he was replaced by Rabbi Yakov Landau, the youngest son of Rabbi Abraham Landau, also known, the book said, as the Ciechanower Rebbe.

Ciechanower Rebbe

I first heard of the Ciechanower Rebbe when I found two articles about Raphael Victor Landau that appeared in the Boston Jewish Advocate in 1946 and 1955. I found the references in a database listing obituaries and marriages for the New England region that can be found in JewishGen. The 1946 article stated that:

Rabbi Landau was born in Lentchitzka (Lenshits), Poland, on May 10, 1877. A descendant of the renowned Ciechanower Rabbi Avromele Landau, Victor Landau was given semicha (ordained as a rabbi) at the age of 18. After four years in Breslau, Germany, as a rabbi, he went to Fiume, Italy, in 1906, where he served as rabbi until 1921 when he immigrated with his family to the United States. His first position was in Manchester, New Hampshire, and in 1925 he came to Boston as New England Secretary of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America. He also established a kosher cafeteria in Cambridge for Jewish students at Harvard.

In 1926 Rabbi Landau accepted the position as rabbi of the Congregation Sons of Israel Congregation in Brookline, which he fills at the present time. Rabbi Landau promptly brought supervision over the butchers in Brookline and Brighton.

In 1927, for the first time in the history of the Jewish Community in New England, he made it possible for any Jewish organization to hold a kosher banquet in one of the most luxurious hotels in Boston, the Copley Plaza. Other hotels have since become available for private banquets and affairs.

Rabbi Landau’s outstanding contribution to the Jewish community of greater Boston was restoring and maintaining the observance of kashrut (dietary laws) at the Beth Israel Hospital in the wards for all private patients who desire it. He also dedicated a Sefer Torah to the hospital in memory of his son, Dr. Felix Landau, who died during World War I.

The article left me wondering who was the Ciechanower rebbe and how was I descended from him? The Encyclopaedia Judaica had an entry entitled Abraham ben Raphael Landau of Ciechanow. The “Czechonower” 1789–1875.* The article reported that almost all of his sons were tzadikim (righteous beings). The eldest and most prominent was Ze’ev Wolf of Strykow (1807–91) regarded as the wisest of the pupils of Menachem Mendel of Kotsk (Kock). Other sons were Jacob of Jezow (1834–94) and Dov Berish of Biala (1820–76). Abraham’s grandsons were also tzadikim. I also soon discovered from another source that a fourth son, Raphael, had been a prominent Warsaw rabbi.

First Hypothesis

Intially, I hypothesized that we might be descended from one of Abraham’s sons, Ze’ev Wolf, Dov Berish, Yakov, or Raphael.The names Raphael and Wolf and Fishel (anglicized to Phillip) frequently appeared in our family. In addition, my grandfather’s line all grew up in Jezow, where Yakov Landau served as rabbi. That hypothesis was discarded because the dates did not fit. Yakov Landau, the Ciechanower’s youngest son, was born in Ciechanow in 1834. I already had proof that my grandfather Simon’s father, Fishel Landau, had married in Jezow in 1842.

The 1842 wedding record claimed that Fishel Landau was 26 years old at the time of his marriage and that his parents were Szymon and Golda Fayga Landau. If accurate, this would mean that Fishel was born around 1816 and Szymon some time in the late 1790s, well before the 1807 birth of Ze’ev Wolf Landau, the eldest son of the Ciechanower. At that time, I had the following tree:

Second Hypothesis

Next, I theorized that Ze’ev Wolf may not have been the Ciechanower rebbe’s first born. As Neil Rosenstein and others have noted, Hassidic anthologies commonly mention only briefly or entirely omit the names of sons who did not become rabbis or scholars. We also know from the eminent Jewish historian, Rabbi Beryl Wein, that in the 19th century, only a small percentage of Polish Jews became rabbis and scholars. I heard this on his history tape entitled The Chasidic Masters, and it is also mentioned in his book The Triumph of Survival. The vast majority struggled to support themselves financially and many died young. I began to think that maybe the elder Szymon Landau (the grandfather of my grandfather, Simon Landau, might have been an older son of the Ciechanower rebbe, born before Ze’ev Wolf Landau, (reportedly, in Plock in 1807).

To test this hypothesis, I needed to find the marriage record of the Ciechanower rebbe and his wife Itta, daughter of Dan Landau from Plock, as well as the birth records of their children. In addition, I needed to locate the vital rec­ords for Szymon Landau and his wife, Golda Fayga.

The obvious place to start would be Plock, since that this is where Abraham and Itta lived when they were supported by Dan Landau. According to the yizkor book on Plock as well as a book called Zechuta D’ Avraham, Landau made a fortune by winning the contract to sell military uniforms and coats to Napoleon’s army during its invasion of Russia. This meant finding data for the period 1800 to 1815, which would include the early Napoleonic period. Unfortunately, the earliest Mormon Jewish records for Plock started in 1808. I found some vital records for Dan Landau, but none pertaining to Abraham and Itta or any of their children for this period.

Third Hypothesis

What if my family’s connection was via Dan Landau, the father-in-law of the Ciechanower rebbe? Perhaps Itta (the wife of the Ciechanower) had some brothers? I could only find one son born to Dan Landau. Yisrael Yitzhak was born in 1808, but he died 12 years later. The late 1790s and early 1800s (until 1808) vital records for Plock showed no mention of the family. The trail seemingly had come to an end and with it any hope of finding my connection to the Ciechanower rebbe.

A Different Path Opens

Sometimes genealogical finds come from seizing opportunities in unplanned moments. In July 2009, my wife and I joined a tour of Poland and Prague organized by Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, the principal of our children’s school. The first day in Poland included a visit to the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw. Although most of my Landau family came from the Lodz area, I wondered if some had moved to Warsaw? I checked the JRI-Poland website, www. jewishgen.org/jri-pl/jriplweb.htm, which includes some names of people buried in the Warsaw Jewish Cemetery, and discovered that two rabbis, Yakov Landau and Dov Berish Landau, were buried there. Excitement increased when I saw that Yakov is listed as the “Jezower rebbe” and Dov Berish as the “Bialer Rebbe.” Clearly they were two of the sons of the Ciechanower rebbe, but I didn’t know why they were buried in Warsaw.

I wanted to visit the graves and have a tangible connection to them and told the tour organizer how keen we were to find their graves once we got to the Warsaw cemetery. He agreed to alert the Polish warden of the cemetery of my request. When we arrived, we were greeted by the warden who told us that the graves were in a big ohel (mausoleum) close to the graves of the Netziv (Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin) and Rabbi Soloveitchik (the Brisker Rav), which we were going to see.

As we arrived at the ohel of the Brisker Rav and the Netziv, Rabbi Lookstein explained that in the latter 19th century when a great rabbi became seriously ill, he needed to do two things. The first was to pray to God for healing. The second was to go to Warsaw, because that is where the best Jewish doctors were! Now I knew why the Jezower rebbe, Yakov Landau, the youngest son of the Ciechanower rebbe and the rabbi of the town in which my grandfather Simon Landau grew up, was buried in Warsaw. About 100 yards from the ohel of the Brisker Rav we found another with a plaque clearly marked: Yezower and Ciechanower rebbe. I returned to New York inspired by my visit to Poland and more determined than ever to find the connection.

Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) Library

I have often found it useful to look again at old sources that I may have looked at years ago when I knew far less than I know today. I decided to visit the wonderful JTS library in New York to look for the book Zechuta de Avraham, which was published in Poland, together with other essays, in 1895 after the death of the Ciechanower rebbe. I had looked at the book some years earlier in the Jewish Division of the New York Research Library, but had found it disappointing and of limited use. I discovered that JTS had several editions of the book on an open shelf, the most recent edition was dated 1970. It was filled with pages about the Ciechanower and his sons. The task now was to battle through the Hebrew in the hope of discovering my familial connection.

Back to the Third Hypothesis

As mentioned above, I had discarded my third hypothesis, that maybe we were descended from the Ciechanower’s father-in-law, Dan Landau of Plock, after I had been able to find mention of only one son who had died at age 12.

The 1970 updated edition of the book I was reading now had an entire chapter devoted to Dan Landau, the parnas (lay leader) of Plock. It reported that Dan had married twice and had six daughters but no son; late in his life, his second wife gave birth to a son. There was much joy in the family and the boy was named Israel Isaac. This was the very same son whose birth record I had previously discovered. The story then continued that the young son was the apple of his old father’s eye. He was reputed to have been a young gaon (genius) and that Dan received great nachas (joy) when his 12-year-old son delivered a brilliant Talmudic discourse in the beautiful newly built great synagogue of Plock. Sadly, soon thereafter, the son became ill and died shortly before attaining his bar mitzvah. I found the son’s death certificate, registered in 1820. With proof of the death of Dan’s only son, it seemed that my third hypothesis had come to a gloomy end.

Fourth Hypothesis

What else was possible? Perhaps we are descended from one of the brothers of the Ciechanower rebbe? According to the book, Zechuta de Avraham, the Ciechanower had two younger brothers, Yitzhak, who died at a young age, and Israel, who became Av Beit Din (chief rabbinic judge) in Lutomiersk. I knew that Raphael and Rada, the parents of the Ciechanower, had moved to Zgierz, Poland, in about 1809 or 1810 and operated a tavern and owned property there. The yizkor book on Zgierz had an extensive chapter of the early life of the Jewish community in Zgierz in the early 1800s.

In January 2010, I decided to order again the Mormon films for Zgierz and methodically looked at all the entries for Landau and Dobryzinski. Many years ago, I had only looked for references to Szymon Landau. This time I decided to look at all of the records with the surname Landau and Dobryzinki in the hope of establishing relationships between them. I quickly found several references to Szymon Landau and his wife, Golda Fayga. Almost all of their children’s names were familiar to me. This time, I found several films with the name Hersh Lajb Landau, son of Szymon and Golda Fayga Landau, and older brother to Fishel Landau, my great-grandfather. One of the earliest films was an 1836 marriage record between Hersh Lajb Landau and Malka Dobryzinska. I was hoping that Malka’s parents would be Raphael and Rada, but was disappointed to find the names Jciek and Dwory instead.

After that came several Landau birth records in the 1840s. The Mormon birth records from Zgierz showed the ages of both Szymon and Hersh Lajb with each birth rec­ord of their children. All of these records showed Hersh Lajb to be an older brother. They named Hersh Lajb Landau as the father, but I did not see Malka’s name as the mother. Instead, Laia Koeningsberg repeatedly appeared as the name of the mother. Maybe Malka had died young and Laia Koeningsberg was Hersh Lajb’s second wife? If so, why did Malka’s name not show up in the Zgierz death records?

Maybe Hersh Lajb and Malka moved somewhere else after marrying in Zgierz, but, if so, where? I tried to decipher where Malka was born in case the new couple had moved to her town. I looked again at the 1836 wedding record. The writing was extremely difficult to read, but it seemed that “Biezun” was the name of the town where Malka was living when she married..

Next, I consulted the JRI-Poland database to see if it listed a place called Biezun. It did—in the vicinity of Warsaw and Plock. An entry with the name Landau under Biezun yielded the following two records:

• Birth of Chaim Landau; father Hersz Leybowicz; mother Malka Ickowicz
• Death of Malka Landau

This looked like my family. It appeared that Malka had died in childbirth in 1839, but that the child may have survived long enough to have its name registered. I later discovered from some of the Zgierz birth records filmed by the Mormons that Hersh Lajb had married Laia Koeningsberg who came from a town called Przasnysc in Plock gubernia in the province of Warsaw. I then checked the Mormon records for Przasnysc and found that their marriage had taken place in Przasnysc in 1841. Her parents were listed as Dawid and Peczca. For further clues, I needed to find and analyze pre-1826 records for both Zgierz and Biezun.

Patronymic Data

Locating pre-1826 Polish Jewish records is extremely difficult because Jewish records for that period are mixed with the Catholic records. Many Jews assumed fixed surnames only slowly over an extended period of time. If possible, many avoided registering their vital data at all for fear of being on the “watch lists” of the Russian authorities for tax and/or conscription purposes. Finally, the Polish record clerks were not always that careful about how they recorded names and ages.

Perusal of the pre-1826 Jewish records for Zgierz, which can be found on the JRI Poland database, produced no new or useful discoveries. Then for reasons that remain inexplicable to me, I looked again at the patronymic names available on the JRI-Poland website for towns other than Zgierz. To my pleasant surprise, there was a link on the patronymic data weblink to Biezun, http://www.jewishgen.org/jri-pl/patronym/status.htm. I opened the Excel spreadsheet which covered the years 1808–22 and found the connection I had been seeking for almost 20 years. It is the marriage in 1819–20:

• Groom: Iciek Dobrzynskich, age 19, father’s name Rafal’a Herskowicz, mother’s name Ruda
• Bride: Dwoyra, age 16, father’s name Wolka, mother’s name Lisosie

As soon as I saw the names Rafal and Rada (misspelled Ruda), I knew that I had solved the mystery. Evidently Jciek was their son and his wife, Dworya, was a Hershkowicz (or daughter of the man called Hersh). They likely were the parents of Malka Dobryzinski, who came to Zgierz in 1836 to marry my ancestor, Hersh Lajb Landau. I then went back to the Zgierz marriage record and confirmed that Malka’s parents were listed as Jciek and Dworya.

Only one step remained. That was to find Malka’s birth record and see if her age was close to that suggested in the Zgierz marriage record. The latter claimed that she was 18 years old in 1836, which would imply she was born around 1818 or 1819. As I have been finding, age records on Polish marriage records are notoriously inaccurate for both brides and grooms alike. The key was to see if I could find a birth record for Malka Dobryzinska.

Another look at the Biezun patronymic information yielded the following record in 1821–22:

• Birth of Malka, father’s name Jciek Rafalowicz, mother’s name Dworya Herszkowicz

The patronymic, Rafalowicz, clinched it. Even Abraham Landau, the Ciechanower used to register the births of his children using the patronymic Rafalowicz when he moved to Ciechanow around 1819. Now it was absolutely clear that Rafal Dobryzinski had a son called Jciek who was a younger brother to the Ciechanower rebbe.

As to Malka’s age, if she was, in fact, born in 1822, she would have been only 14 years old when she married Hersh Lajb in 1836 in Zgierz. This was not at all unusual in those days. Malka’s grandmother, Rada Auerbach, was about the same age when she married Raphael Dobryzinski, a widower, in the late 1780s. Malka’s 1839 death rec­ord from Biezun in 1839 listed her age at death as 19 years, not far off from the 18 years we can infer if she was born in 1821.

Final Step

As a final step, I looked again at the book Zechuta De Avraham and found the section that deals with the brothers of the Ciechanower rebbe. Regarding Jciek there were a few sentences in Hebrew that said the following about Jciek:

To Reb Raphael of blessed memory there were three sons and two daughters. The first son was the holy elder, Rabbi Abraham. The second, the rabbi R. Yitzhak (Jciek) from the town of Biezun, who died in the days of his youth at a time of great stress and he was a wonderful gaon (genius) and a man of holiness and purity. The third [son] was the rabbi and gaon, the chassid, Israel, the av bet din of Lutomiersk.

What was the “time of great stress” and when exactly did Jciek die? Perhaps this refers to the 1830s in Poland, a stressful period that started with the Polish uprising (against Russian rule) in 1831, followed by a severe crack-down by the Russians and accompanied by hunger and disease. I was told about this by a Polish colleague of mine at work and also saw an extensive article on the Polish 1831 uprising on Wikipedia which sites several Polish sources. According to Rabbi Berel Wein, (on his history tape, The Chassidic Masters) many of the Jews, including the famous Kotzker rebbe, were strong supporters of the Polish rebels and even changed their surnames for fear of being found by the Russians and Cossacks in the crackdown against the Polish rebels, thus, increasing pressures and hardships for the Jews.

When I found the birth record for the child of Hersh Lajb Landau and Malka Dobryzinska, I saw that the child had been named Jciek Chaim. It looked as though the boy had been named after the deceased Jciek, but the second name, Chaim, seemed to imply that the newly born child was extremely sickly and in danger for his life, hence the giving of the amuletic name Chaim, in the hope that the child would survive. Since I have not found any further records for him, the question of his survival remains unanswered.

Final Thoughts

After many years of effort I had finally uncovered my connection to the Ciechanower rebbe. The long road I had taken to this discovery reminded me of Thomas Edison. When Edison was asked for the secret of his many great discoveries, he is reputed to have said, “I failed my way to success!”

All of my initial hypotheses proved wrong until, through seeming luck and persistence, my fourth hypothesis yielded the sought-for breakthrough. It now seems as though the connection to the Ciechanower rebbe was not as direct as Raphael Victor may have thought. Instead the key figures turned out to be Jciek Dobryzinski (the brother of the Ciechanower rebbe) and Hersh Lajb Landau (the eldest son of Szymon Landau, after whom my grandfather, Simon Landau, had been named).

References

Dabrowska, Danuta and Abraham Wein, eds. Pinkas Hakehillot Polin—Lodz Vehagalil. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1976.

Shtokfish, David, ed. Sefer Zgierz. Tel Aviv, 1975.

Verdiger, Yakov, Sefer Zekhuta de Avraham. Tel Aviv, 1970.

Note

* Rabbi, author, and Hassidic tzadik of Poland, scholar, and ascetic. His family name was originally Dobrzinsky, but when he married the daughter of Dan Landau, the parnas of Plock, who supported him for many years, he changed it to Landau. Abraham’s mentor in Hassidism was Rabbi Fishel of Strykow. He was an admirer of Simcha Bunim of Przysucha whom he twice visited. In 1819, Abraham was appointed rabbi of Ciechanow, where he officiated until his death. Although invited to serve as rabbi in Lodz, Lublin, and Plock, he refused to leave the small community. From 1866, he was acknowledged as a tzadik by the Hasidim in Ciechanow, but continued to follow the Ashkenazi rite contrary to Hasidic practice. He never followed the custom of receiving petitions or money from his followers. Abraham frequently took part in consultations over public matters of Jewish interest. In general adopting a stand of extreme conservatism, he strongly opposed the order of the Russian authorities that Jews should modify their dress. His published works include: Ahavat Hesed (1897) on the orders of Nashim and Tohorot. Zekhuta de Avraham (1865), sermons and Beit Avraham on halachik questions. Almost all of his sons were tzadikim. The eldest and most prominent was Ze’ev Wolf of Strykow (1807–91) regarded as the wisest of the pupils of Menachem Mendel of Kotsk (Kock); author of Zer Zahav (1900) on the Torah. He wrote poetry and had an elegant Hebrew style. Other sons of Abraham were Jacob of Jezow (1834–94) and Dov Berish of Biala (1820–76). Abraham’s grandsons were also tzadikim.

David Landau was born in Cape Town, South Africa. He is a professional investment manager who currently lives in New York City with his wife and three children.