The Lehmans of Kolomea: Round 1

(As I wish to put this in writing as soon as possible (I’ve promised to give an overview to several people who have expressed interest in this family) and my Twitter thread of last night and this morning is not adequate in that regard, here is a quick post (not as rigorous and detailed as I would like) on my fresh discovery. I hope to issue a ‘Round 2’ version with all the sources and references included.)

Over the past few days, I’ve finally cracked a longstanding mystery in my maternal grandmother’s family – a loose thread in many genealogical works – and now that I am sure my solution is correct, I present it here.

The mystery concerns the family background of my great-great-uncle, R. Asher Lehman of Kolomea, who married Rivka née Brandwein, the sister of my maternal great-grandmother, Sarah Sosha Horowitz of Boston (d. 1972) (“the Bostoner Rebbetzin”)

Background: Turka-Stretin, and so on

While this may be superfluous for rabbinic genealogy buffs, let me first explain the family context of Rivka and Asher, before I get to what the mystery surrounding them is and the way toward the solution.

Rivka and her sister Sarah Sosha were the daughters of my great-great-grandfather R. Yechiel Michel Brandwein (called דער זיידע ר׳ מעכעלע ‘der zeyde Reb Mekhele‘ in the family), the Hasidic Rebbe of Turka-Stretin. He was born in Galicia (presumably, around 1871; there is some nebulosity around his date and place of birth) to his mother, Esther, a descendant of the Stretin dynasty (hence the name Brandwein), and to his father R. Aharon Brandwein of Felsztyn (modern Sekelivka, Ukraine), originally Landau, of the Alik dynasty, under which most Hasidic taxonomies place the family. (The reason for taking his wife’s surname is said to be connected with his being a Russian citizen in Galicia.)

R. Aharon and his children, including Michel, then a child, joined his father, R. Tzvi Aryeh (Hersh Leib) in Tsfat (Safed). R. Michel eventually married Gitel, daughter of R. Avraham Yosef (“Alter”) haLevi of Tiberias, in the 1880s, not long before the latter’s death in 1887.

While of dynastic descent, he was not a Rebbe in any sense in the Holy Land; he was a Hasid of the rebbes of Chortkiv. Around the turn of the twentieth century, a time of great dearth in Ottoman Palestine, he took his rebbe’s advice and returned to Galicia to become a rebbe there, in Turka, now in Ukraine.

There R. Mechele presided as Stretiner Rebbe (hence the appellation “Turka-Stretiner Rebbe”) through the First World War (with some time as a refugee in Czechoslovakia). After the First World War, though, with communities torn apart and traditional life in chaos, his prospects as a Rebbe were weak there. Then, after his wife Gitel died in Turka in 1924, he remarried and shortly after moved to America, where his daughter and son-in-law R. Pinchas David Horowitz of Boston had already settled. He established himself as a Rebbe in the Lower East Side and had several more children from his second wife (some of whom are still with us).

Then he passed away in 1939, several months before the outbreak of the Second World War. His second wife would remarry and would, with her new husband R. Tzvi Hirsch Yaar (who had lost his own family in the Holocaust), raise the children she had with R. Michel.

The Brandwein family in the Holocaust

Meanwhile, by 1939, R. Michel’s children from Gitel were all at least in their teens, some adults, or even married. My great-grandmother and one brother were in the United States; one brother was in Jerusalem; two brothers and a married sister, Rivka Lehman, were still in Poland, in Galicia.

Then came the Holocaust. When it was over, as far as anyone could tell (and thus was recorded in family memorial pages: see the end of טל אורות Tal Orot, published by R. Aharon Yaakov Brandwein in New York, 1975; see also the memorial page at the front of the edition of Baal Shem Tov published by great-uncle R. Moshe Horowitz in New York, 1948), my great-grandmother’s brothers Avraham Yosef and Shalom had died, as well as Rivka, her husband Asher Lehman, and their four children.

As was often the case, little was spoken about them again. Of Rivka, all we knew amounts to this: she lived with her husband in the relatively large Galician town of Kołomyja (now Kolomyia, Ukraine, also Kolomea, etc.), where he was a minor Hasidic Rebbe. They had four children who perished with them. And we know that he was a Levi, as he is referred to as “Segal Lehman“. (Side point: I can’t find the ultimate source of this part, crucial to my resolution… Vunder’s encyclopedia already mentions him as ‘Segal’, but I can’t find his source.) Where he came from, who his parents were – all completely unknown, which is unheard of for this side of the family. (Had I then seen the memorial page by my great-uncle R. Moshe Horowitz, linked above, I would at least have known that he came from Jerusalem.)

(Avraham Yosef’s story ends up being much more complicated, but I’ll leave it here for now, as most of the research isn’t mine, and I am not familiar with all aspects of the story; suffice it to say that he probably did not die in the Holocaust.)

The first clue

Several years ago, thanks to JRI-Poland, there was finally a crack in the case: Rivka’s (late) marriage record was finally indexed (uploaded to the database in 2017, if I understand correctly). And things only got more intriguing.

According to the indexed record (Kołomyja marriages, 1936, no. 24), Uscher Leib Lehman from Beyreut, Syrja (modern Beirut, Lebanon), aged 54, son of Berl and Jente (Yenta) Lehman, married Rywka Brandwein, from Safad, Palestyna (Safed, Israel), aged 38, daughter of Mechel and Gitel Brandwein.

What do we learn from this? Firstly, we seem to have a fuller version of Asher’s name: Asher Leib. (This name combination, unfortunately, led a very talented genealogist cousin after a red herring.)

More importantly, we have his parents’ names, an age (16 years older than his wife!), and oddest of all, a place of birth in modern Lebanon, not known for much of an Ashkenazic community.

For all this, the trail still went cold again.

Things warm up again

Last week, while trying to rediscover the names of Holocaust victims on another side of the family, I was made aware of a source that lists children born in Kolomea who are almost certainly Rivka and Asher’s. (I must be vague for now; for now, see what I wrote in the ‘About’ section of Rivka’s Geni profile.)

This inspired me to search once more for Asher Lehman and see if I could find any relatives of his. My newly inspired search term was the combination סג״ל לעהמאן Segal Lehman, Segal being a somewhat less common alternative for the haLevi designation for a Levite. This lead to my awareness of an American rabbi, previously from Safed and Jerusalem, whose Hebrew name was דוב אריה סג״ל לעהמאן Dov Aryeh Segal Lehman, who was known in English-language sources as Bernard L. Lehman (or simply B. L. Lehman). He spent his final years as a rabbi in St. Louis, Missouri, where he is buried. My attempt at finding a connection between the Asher and Dov Aryeh led directly to the next discovery.

My Rosetta Stone: Mazel Tov!

Searching in the National Library of Israel’s Newspaper Collection, I found the following announcement of congratulations on the birth of a son (Doar haYom of 17 August 1920, vol. 2, iss. 261, p. 1):

Mazal Tov announcement by Binyamin, Yaakov, and Moshe Lehman, to their brother Yitzchak Asher Lehman of Kolomea and his wife Rivka on the birth of a son, and to the grandfather, Rabbi Dov Aryeh Lehman of St. Louis

Binyamin, Yaakov, and Moshe Lehman (presumably of Jerusalem, where the newspaper was published) congratulate their brother, Yitzchak Asher Lehman, and his wife Rivka, of Kolomea, on the birth of a son. Also mentioned is their father, the boy’s grandfather, Rabbi Dov Aryeh Segal Lehman of St. Louis. (I have not addressed the א prefix before each of the three brothers’ names; see below.)

The correspondence with my family’s Asher is apparent, even more so in light of the new records which show that Asher and Rivka’s first son, Aharon, was born in 1920. After all, we have a partial name match for husband and wife, and for the father too, for that matter (Dov being the Hebrew for Berl), and the town matches too. Of course, Asher Leib with Dov Aryeh is somewhat problematic, but the rarity of Lehmans in Kolomea meant that would not dissuade me from at least searching further.

The Lehman family of St. Louis and elsewhere

Of course, I needed more context. As it happens, much of the research around Rabbi Dov Aryeh Lehman had already been done, and mostly I just had to find sourcing for anonymous trees online rather than working from scratch. And this is the picture I got:

Rabbi Dov Aryeh Segal Lehman, commonly known as Berl, seems to have grown up in Safed, and married a woman from Safed as well, Yenta née Cohen-Mohliver (not of the famous Mohliver family; she was an aunt of R. Yisroel Ber Odesser‘s on his wife’s side). He had a yeshiva in Safed, later he had one in Jerusalem, he was a rabbi in Metula near Lebanon, and was in Bucharest for a while. Online trees give him four known sons who lived to adulthood: Yosef Chaim (born in Egypt and took the surname Berlman), Avraham Binyamin Zev, Eliyahu Moshe, and Eliezer Yaakov. An excellent match so far! (And we now have an explanation for the א. before their names: א for Avraham, א for Eliyahu, א for Eliezer.)

In the 1910s he was forced to leave the Ottoman Empire. He came to the United States around 1913, eventually becoming the rabbi of a congregation (or three congregations, according to his obituary) in St. Louis, Missouri. His wife Yenta and his son Yosef Chaim Berlman joined him there until his death in 1924. (See his entry at Kevarim.com, coincidentally uploaded only last week.)

The two youngest sons eventually brought their mother back to Jerusalem, where they married, and she died soon after and is buried on Har haZeitim, next to a daughter who died in childhood.

Reading through the various public trees and the obituaries of several family members, I could not find any mention of a fifth (eldest) brother “Yitzchak Asher”, though. Especially concerning was Rabbi Lehman’s 22 February 1924 obituary in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (p. 21), which enumerates his three sons in Israel in addition to his son in St. Louis, omitting a fifth son in Poland. I needed strong evidence to weigh things the other way.

Family tradition to the rescue

Finally, I tracked down Rabbi Lehman’s relatives and descendants, and things became much clearer. The files of Shoshana Weinberg of Ma’ale Amos (whose mother-in-law, Bonnie Weinberg, is Yosef Chaim Berlman’s daughter) record a family tradition that Dov Aryeh and Yenta indeed had five sons, the eldest being Yitzchak, a Hasidic rabbi in קולוניה (“Colonia”, interpreted as Cologne), whose precise fate during the Holocaust was unknown.

While the matter is settled, as far as I’m concerned, there is much to elaborate upon in the Weinberg files on the Lehman family, which Shoshana graciously shared with me. (My thanks also to the Cohen-Mohliver expert, Ilana Goshen-Cohen, a descendant of one of Yenta’s brothers, and Aviva Gatt, another one of Yosef Chaim’s granddaughters, who helped direct my research questions to Shoshana. And while I’m at it, thanks also to my cousin Zvi Aryey Brandwein for his previous help with the Lehman family and the Brandwein side in general.)

One tidbit of future research material I must share here, as I know there is scholarly interest in this: according to family tradition, which I’ve been able to confirm circuitously, Rabbi Dov Aryeh Lehman was the brother of Rabbi Yosef Tovia (Joseph Tobias) Levy, a prominent Sephardic rabbi of New York City in the 1930s (“rabbi of the Turkish Sephardim”, per his signature), of the controversial rabbinic work זכרון יהודא ויוסף Zikhron Yehuda veYosef (New York, 1939).

The confusion in surnames in the family (Levy vs. Lehman vs. Berlman; there was also a brother Silver, and Dov Aryeh’s mother, and Yosef Tovia at one point, were called Silberman) is probably part of what hindered the two families of Asher and Rivka’s nieces and nephews from finding each other: the Lehman branch was under the impression that Yitzchak (as they know him) used the surname Levi.

Other unfinished business

There is more to be said about Asher; having found his marriage record proper, it appears he was a widower (explaining the large age gap between him and his wife). I have reason to suspect that his wife was an Eichenkatz, of a family who are cousins to the rabbinic Sternbuchs.

Also not adequately explored: Rabbi Dov Aryeh’s many wanderings, and even more so his brother Rabbi Joseph Tobias Levy’s. To be revisited, with more citations and rigour, hopefully in the near future!