But the next time he went, aged 60, he had a 95 per cent blockage of his carotid artery, and was weeks away from death. Worried by the deaths, I urged my husband to see a cardiologist, and the first year he was fine. While my relatives were living longer as years went by, many into their hundreds, the Kelm descendants often died relatively young. The more I read the genealogy, the more the family seemed doomed. The most influential leader of Mir in modern times, a cousin to my husband, was such a rock star that his funeral, at age 68, drew thousands of black-coated mourners weeping and pounding the streets of Jerusalem in 2011. My husband’s mother, a torch-song singer, had longstanding heart failure a great-granddaughter of the Golden Belly, she dropped dead from salty food on a Caribbean cruise in 1997. My husband’s uncle Meyer, a Los Angeles rag-trade impresario, dropped dead after a massive cerebral haemorrhage in 1975, aged 58. Rabbi Judah Sacks died in New York City in 1903, aged 58. But even when advancements of medicine expanded the lifespans of others, many from the red-haired Kelm clan didn’t live long. But most fanned out, landing at the forefront of medicine, law, cosmology, the arts – worldwide. Another of the daughters helped to bring to Jerusalem what would become the massive Mir Yeshiva, founded in 1814 in Belarus today, it is one of the world’s largest centres for the study of the Talmud, fuelled by Mussar, the ethical system honed by the rabbis of Kelm.Ĭousins who stayed behind in Kelm were slaughtered when Nazis gathered them into the courtyard of their great yeshiva and shot them on 29 July 1941 they are buried in a mass grave on a local farm. This line of descendants lived in relative luxury in an elevator building on Grand Street, on New York’s Lower East Side all their weddings were performed by my husband’s great-grandfather (youngest son of ‘the Golden Belly’), the Manhattan rabbi Judah Sacks. They scammed poor Italian immigrants into buying fake jewellery, and when victims couldn’t pay up, they threw them in a fake jail the family rented from corrupt city officials, controlled by fake cops paid by the family. One of those daughters gave rise to a criminal gang so notorious that they were on the front page of the New York City papers for a solid year in 1902. Like so many other Jews of their generation, most of her offspring booked passage for New York City. My husband’s great-great-grandmother, Eliezer’s daughter Rebecca, was called ‘the Golden Belly’ in the genealogy because she bore four daughters and five sons who all became rabbis. And under the Second Partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, they were subject to an onerous draft that took conscripted Jewish boys from age 12 and as young as eight military service was for 25 years. Like other Jews forced to flee the Ukrainian pogroms, the Gutmans of 19th-century Kelm were poorer than ever.
By 1810, he’d moved to the hardscrabble shtetl of Kelm, becoming the town’s chief rabbi and establishing a yeshiva that became renowned. Four years later, my husband’s great-great-great-grandfather Eliezer Gutman was born in Lithuania, in the city of Plunge. In 1768, Jehiel’s great-grandson Rabbi Zvi Hirsch of Lysyanka in Ukraine was killed by Cossacks, who chased him from his home near Kiev through Romania and Bulgaria to the Turkish border, hundreds of miles away. The Martyr of Nemirov is his historic name.Īfter the slaughter, the rabbis fled to other shtetls across the Pale of Settlement – the swath of Europe covering parts of Poland, Lithuania, Russia and Ukraine where Jews were allowed to live. Jehiel Michael ben Eliezer, the rabbi of Nemirov and my husband’s great(x9)-grandfather, ran to the cemetery hoping at least to be buried – but he was clubbed to death, then left to rot. But Cossacks carrying Polish flags tricked their way in, reportedly killing children, boiling victims in vats, and flaying them alive. Some 6,000 Jews had sought refuge behind the fortified walls. My husband’s forebears, rabbinical ancestors of the Kelm elite, were prominent in 1648 when Cossacks stormed the town of Nemirov, then in Russian Poland, now in Ukraine. The massive genealogy we ultimately received by email spanned five continents, 16 generations and almost 400 years of grief. The impoverished little town was known for its fierce schools of Talmudic learning, or yeshivas it was a centre of Mussar – a strict system of ethics based on logic and the rigorous practice of mindfulness, a meditative approach to self-reflection and prayer.
A few years ago, my husband was contacted by genealogists tracking descendants of rabbis from the Lithuanian shtetl of Kelm.
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