Where was R. David of Lelov born?

Horowitz side 2 Minutes

Last night, I found myself rehashing an old, small discovery of mine on Twitter: my attempt at reconciling the two traditions about the place of birth my ancestor, R. David Biderman, the first rebbe of Lelov (Lelów, Poland), whose yahrtzeit (anniversary of death) is today.

By this morning, though, the retelling had grown beyond my original concept.

I ought, perhaps, to rewrite this as a blogpost of its own (after my Epstein and Rubin series are worked out of my system), but so as to not deprive my blog-only readers, I present you the tweets as they are, more or less, embedding only every second tweet so as not to be repetitive.

(And to my Twitter followers: ‘more or less’, I said; note the meta-commentary in the captions!)

Yes, I like using @Yahrtzeits as inspiration for tweet-threads, as you may have noticed.
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it as ‘Fradla’, which is why I make a point of spelling it in Yiddish only at first.
If you’re going to use Hasidic tales as evidence, you should be walking! A map is linked below.
Biała Wielka means ‘big Biała’, so all things being equal, it would be the better candidate for an unspecified Biała.
Put on your walking shoes, and hum a Hasidic niggun. Take a dip in the river – see below!
This, fittingly, also needed reexamination, q.v. below…
R. Mordechai’s book is the same pictured above, and the same as that referred to by @Yahrtzeits.
I should have made this clearer… the author‘s first cousin by marriage, not the repentant doctor’s.
Perhaps the eminent doctor was not traveling on foot, but in the spirit of things…
Who was the lord of the two towns? I have no idea how to look that up.
This Papiernia – like all the others of that name, a paper mill – has no doubt disappeared because it was a Jewish paper-milling town, and its inhabitants were all attached to said mill; no Jews, no mill, no town.
R. Aharon of Biala-Beilitz (as it is known in Yiddish) was there on a pilgrimage to his ancestor R. David’s grave, for the yahrtzeit, and heard the story from the ancient wagon-driver’s passenger that day, a fellow pilgrim to the grave of ‘Rabin Davidka’.
Geni, like Wikipedia: can’t stand a large part of it, can’t imagine research without it.
Read ‘it isn’t interesting enough’.
The notes I refer to are the same that appear in my Twitter header: I wanted a manuscript, in the strict sense. Colophon included!

Published by P. Y. Mund

Jewish genealogist based in Toronto.

Published

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