The LANDAU Monologues in Six Parts (6 of 6)

Part 6 of 6 — Haskel LANDAU Revisited

Coming back to the story of Haskel LANDAU, two new supportive pieces of information came to my attention in mid 2014.

First, in June 2014, Joachim in Basel shared with me a collection of Kempen Jewish cemetery gravestone inscriptions copied by R. Bernhard BRILLING from work done earlier by R. Louis LEWIN.  He recalled that I had asked him about those inscriptions back in 2008.  Fortunately, I immediately turned around and shared the material with Shimshi in (or formerly in) Zurich.

Shimshi’s reading of the 1860 gravestone inscription of Sara REHFISCH geb. LANDAU showed that her father was Jecheskel and that she claimed descent from the Noda b’Jehuda.  Based on her age (and name), Sara was the same person as Zorel LANDAU. the daughter of Haskel and Nesche born in Kempen on 23 September 1834.

(Sara’s gravestone inscription also noted her descent from the Sha”ch, R. Shabbatai haKohen (1621-1662) — a whole new rabbinical ancestor.  The Sha”ch was buried in the old Jewish cemetery in Holleschau (Holesov) which Don and I happened to visit on 9 November 2012 on our drive from Kojetin to Bautsch (on the way to Breslau with a short stop in Zülz).  We saw and photographed his well visited and much honored gravestone.  (As an aside to an aside, the Sha”ch studied in Lublin under R. Naftali ben Jitzhak Kohen Zadik (KATZ), our 8x great grandfather who was the great great grandfather of the wife of R. Joseph LANDAU, brother of the Noda b’Jehuda (as noted above).))

A couple weeks later, I received a copy of a Jichus Brief that I had heard about from Shimshi a year earlier but had not pursued.  It was mentioned in R. Meir WUNDER’s work “Meorei Galicia” (“Encyclopedia of Galician Rabbis and Scholars”). The Jichus Brief was a small sheet with a handwritten family tree in Hebrew prepared in 1930 by Wolf SCHEINWECHSLER  of Czestochowa for his nephew Samuel PLAWNER of Krakow.  It showed the ancestry of Wolf’s mother Hendla SCHEINWECHSLER geb. LANDAU, both the ancestry of her mother Nesche LANDAU and of her father Jecheskel LANDAU.

Nesche’s ancestry matched what I had pieced together in 1998 and 2008 (and then some).  The Jichus Brief seems to match current understandings of the LANDAU ancestry.  Nesche's line goes up to R. Israel Jonah LANDAU and then follows his mother's PERETZ family to the THEOMIMs and then the WAHLs.  The only mistake or typographical error is that, in Generation 11 (starting from Hendla SCHEINWECHSLER geb. LANDAU), R. Jonah THEOMIM was said to be a son of R. Meir WAHL of Brest, rather than his son-in-law.

To my great pleasure, Haskel was said to be a son of R. Jitzhak LANDAU of Wlodawa who died in Tiberias, with the steps back to the Noda b’Jehuda.  The Jichus Brief did not mention the Sha”ch, but it did note descent (via Haskel) from the ReMA, R. Moses ISSERLES (1520-1572), whose great great granddaughter was the wife of the Sha”ch

Although others with whom I have consulted prefer to stick with the received wisdom that Haskel was only married to a daughter of R. Joseph Samuel, I consider the 1860 gravestone and the 1930 Jichus Brief as good independent confirmation that Nesche LANDAU’s husband was Jecheskel (Haskel) LANDAU, son of Jitzhak LANDAU of Wlodawa, great great grandson of his namesake the Noda b’Jehuda, R. Jecheskel (Ezekiel) LANDAU of Prague.

It would be nice to know whether Wolf SCHEINWECHSLER had produced this family tree from his own research (and what sources he had consulted) or whether he was just passing on a family tree that had been prepared some time earlier, or was the result of family memory.  Time and the Shoah have erased that chapter of the history of genealogy.