BlogWhen we first started this series of stories about our Family history, it quickly became obvious that some additional digging into the past would be required. Some stories or names or even dates we thought we knew were, lets say, not exactly accurate – for many reasons.
One of our dear grandmothers, for example, changed her date of birth from 1899 to 1901 – as she explained, “Not to be from the 19th century”; another loved one, changed his patronymic name just “because it sounded better”; or one very pretty and young-looking lady always cut a few years from her age, until once someone asked “So, you gave birth to your daughter at the age of 10?” You understand, dear reader, don’t you? We do.
The maiden name of Sasha’s grandmother, Luba, was always known within the family as Rosalskaya – a name very similar to the main character, Anna Pavlovna, in Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s novel “What Is To Be Done?”, but definitely not a proper surname for a Jewish girl, who ran from Lithuania at the beginning of World War I.
Her real name was Leeba Rosenblatt, and she took the name Rosalskaya around 1918 for her short career as a young actress in Kharkov. Soon after she got married, the names Rosalskaya and Rosenblatt became history.
Leeba was the youngest of three sisters. She was born in 1894, in Panevezys, Lithuania, a few years after her father, Rabbi Abraham Rosenblatt, relocated there from Vilna.
The Rosenblatt family, as we know it, began with Leeba’s great-grandfather, who at the start of the 19th century lived in the city of Torun on the Vistula river, East Prussia (now – Poland). Toruń is one of the oldest cities in Eastern Europe and also widely considered as one of the most beautiful. It miraculously escaped destruction during most European wars and, recently, was included in the list of The Seven Wonders of Poland and named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was also the birthplace of Nicolaus Copernicus. Perhaps, one day we will go there.
Many Jews at that time were attracted by Prussia and The Austro-Hungarian empire. Edicts of Tolerance in the Hapsburg Empire and, later, the Edict of 1812 in Prussia permitted all Jews in their countries to be full citizens, or, as the Edicts of Tolerance stated it – “to make the Jewish population useful to the state.” Jewish children were allowed to attend state schools and universities, all positions were declared open to be occupied by Jews, and ownership of real estate was granted – although, in reality, some of the articles soon became far more complicated or were never fully implemented.
At the beginning of the 19th century, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Prussia, it was required for Jews to register their family names – much earlier than in the East of Europe and in Russia. Before that, Jewish names were changed with every generation, combining given names with the name of the father for boys and the mother for girls.
It seems that the family name, Rosenblatt, began to be used around that time. Leeba’s grandfather was born in Torun in the 1830s as Yahel Rosenblatt. He came from a family of merchants and later continued the family business – Torun was an important river-port, and the business was related to the trade with Lithuania. It looks like the business was successful, because Yahel was able to establish a place in Vilna, which was used as an office for his business, and later, as a family house.
His son Abraham, Leeba’s father, was also born in Torun. He was about ten years old when the Rosenblatt family moved to Vilna, in the early 1870s.
In the second half of the 19th century Vilna, unlike Torun, became a center of Jewish political activity and culture. Literature was published in both Hebrew and Yiddish, the State Art School was opened. Famous Jewish artists, such as Chaim Soutine, lived and worked in Vilna, and Jewish theatre companies held performances often. What was even more important, as one study formulates it – “middle-class occupations in the Lithuanian provinces were heavily dominated by the Jews”. Although Lithuania at that time was a province of the Russian Empire, open anti-Semitic actions were rare, compared to the southern parts of the Pale of Settlement.
Jewish students attended the Gymnasium and other types of non-Jewish schools, as well as private or state-sponsored Jewish schools – until the early 1890s, educational quotas did not apply. There were also many traditional and modernized heders, yeshivas and rabbinical schools.
Education could have been a major reason for the family’s move to Vilna, because Yahel sent Abraham to one of those rabbinical schools. At the time there were two types of such schools in the Russian Empire – traditional and state-sponsored.
State-sponsored Rabbinical School and Teachers’ Seminaries were used to prepare Jewish teachers and rabbis to work in modernized Jewish communities. In addition to Talmud and Hebrew Bible study, students learned German, Russian and Hebrew languages, history and geography, math and science, writing and art. Those types of schools were open all over, from Lithuania to South Ukraine, to prepare the so-called state (or crown) rabbis.
The government saw the state rabbis as the only official institution and progressive Jewish communities supported the notion that rabbis should play a role in their secular – social, economic, and intellectual – aspects of life. The Orthodoxy, on the other hand, accepted only traditional, spiritual rabbis as legitimate, which led to so-called “dual rabbinate” in many Jewish communities.
We have a reason to believe that Abraham attended one of those state-sponsored institutions. Curriculum required seven to eight years in the undergraduate department, following three to four years of graduate school to be a rabbi or a teacher.
Abraham Rosenblatt graduated as a rabbi around 1886 and worked as a rabbi assistant for the next three years.
Soon after his graduation he married Khisya Goltzman, and their first child, Miriam, was born in 1888.
Around 1890 Abraham was assigned to one of the new Jewish communities in Panevezys, where Leeba Rosenblatt, the youngest of his three daughters and Sasha’s grandmother, was born in 1895.
The next twenty years were relatively peaceful and happy for the Rosenblatt family. Soon after that, migrations and distractions, caused by War, The Russian Revolution and internal conflicts within the Jewish communities, would become a norm of life.
But those will be other stories.
P.S. The title picture – Vilnius panorama, 1600. From T. Makowski’s “Vilniaus architektūra.”
