Haskel LANDAU and R. Zwi Jecheskel MICHELSON (Part 11 of 6)

For the last 8 years, I  have wondered whether R. Zwi Jecheskel MICHELSON (1863-ca.1942) made a little mistake.

Well, at first, I did not know that the mistake could be attributed to R. MICHELSON (or even to his having just repeated it).  I only knew that a small piece of the LANDAU family tree published by Dr. Neil ROSENSTEIN in his work “The Unbroken Chain” (2nd Ed. 1990) seemed too close to fitting my family line not to be suspected of containing an error.  As I have written before, that was the purported marriage of R. Ezekiel LANDAU, son of R. Isaac LANDAU of Wlodawa, to a daughter of R. Joseph Samuel LANDAU of Kempen.  From what I subsequently learned, it was R. Zwi Jecheskel MICHELSON who first (?) wrote about that.

Zwi Jecheskel MICHELSON was born in Bilgoraj in 1863.  He was a rabbi in Warsaw.  Sadly, he lived long enough to be deported and murdered in the Shoah, probably in Treblinka K.Z in about 1942.  His wife Hinda Sarel SZWERDSZARF (d.1924, Warsaw) was a great great granddaughter of R. Israel Jonah LANDAU (d.1824) of Kempen.  R. MICHELSON (re)published a work of R. Israel Jonah LANDAU entitled “Sefer Ein haBedolach” with a preface in which he included information about his wife’s LANDAU family.  Among other things, R. MICHELSON wrote that R. Jecheskel, son of R. Isaak LANDAU of Wlodawa, was a son-in-law of R. Joseph Samuel LANDAU (ca.1799-1836) of Kempen, a brother of Hannah ASCHKENAZI geb. LANDAU, great grandmother of Hinda Sarel.

To insert my family into this picture, it only required imaging that R. MICHELSON had made a small mistake.  Rather than Jecheskel LANDAU having married an unknown daughter of R. Joseph Samuel LANDAU of Kempen, I suspect that that this same Jecheskel LANDAU had actually married Nesche, a daughter of [R. (?)] Arjeh Jehuda Leib LANDAU (ca.1780-1838) of Kempen, another sibling of Hannah and Joseph Samuel.  I began imaging that 8 years ago yesterday.

It was only during the last two months’ immersion in all things LANDAU, that I realized that R. Joseph Samuel LANDAU had no daughter who could have been the wife (only wife or second wife) of Jecheskel (Haskel) LANDAU.  When R. Joseph Samuel LANDAU died in Kempen in 1836, the death entry includes a list of his surviving family members, including his widow Elke, his 5 sons and his 2 daughters, one of whom was already married at that time.  The daughter Rosa (Rosalie), born ca.1820, married Jochen (Chaim) COHN.  The other daughter Gitel (Henriette), was not quite 3 years old when her father died.  In 1865, she married her first cousin Josef Szyja PERETZ.  There is no available information to suggest that either Rosa or Henriette had a second marriage, before or after the one each is known to have had.

So, if Jecheskel (Haskel) LANDAU, son of R. Isaac of Wlodawa, was married into the family of R. Israel Jonah LANDAU of Kempen, it seems much more likely that this was the man Haskel LANDAU, Kaufmann in Kempen, who was married to Nesche LANDAU, daughter of Arjeh Jehuda Leib LANDAU of Kempen.   The wife of Haskel still has the same relationship to R. MICHELSON’s wife as he “knew” it to be — first cousin of the grandmother of MICHELSON’s wife.  It is just that she was a daughter of one brother of Hannah rather than another.  There is no reason to suspect that R. Joseph Samuel LANDAU had a posthumous daughter who would have married a fairly old Haskel in 1860 or later.