More Ideas about Haskel LANDAU (Part 8 of 6)

Part 8 – Haskel LANDAU of Kempen and R. Ezechiel LANDAU (1880-1965)

Earlier, in writing about Kurt BACH, I included a long digression about the family of Lotte GLOVER geb. LANDAU of Florida.
 
The quick summary is that Lotte’s father was a rabbi named Ezechiel LANDAU (1888, Neu-Sandec, Galicia – 1965, New York).  His father was Isak (Icyk) LANDAU (1863, Przyrow – 1943, Theresienstadt).  R. Ezechiel LANDAU was a friend of Sanitätsrat Dr. Josef BACH (1867, Myslowitz – 1942, Theresienstadt) and visited him in Breslau.  Lotte also thought that her father had visited family in Myslowitz (where Amalie BACH geb. LANDAU lived until her death in 1925).  According to Lotte’s brother R. Sol LANDAU of Miami, Isak’s father was Jecheskel LANDAU, and he or Lotte thought that Isak’s father was a rabbi in Kempen.
 
The finding aid for the Sol Landau Papers in the archive of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York contains the statement that R. Ezechiel LANDAU was a great grandson of R. Ezekiel (Jecheskel) LANDAU (1713-1793) of Prague.  I suspected that “great grandson” might have been a misconstruing of “ancestor”, since three generations seems a little too few to get back to the Noda b’Jehuda.

Without having recognized in 1998 that Jecheskel and Haskel were alternate forms of the same name (Ezekiel / Ezechiel), I thought that the most reasonable way for R. Ezechiel LANDAU to be related to Sanitätsrat Dr. Josef BACH would be for Ezechiel to be a great grandson of Haskel LANDAU of Kempen, Josef BACH’s grandfather and my great great great grandfather.  So, I guessed that Isak’s father Jecheskel was a previously unknown son of my great great great grandparents Haskel LANDAU and Nesche LANDAU geb. LANDAU of Kempen.

Since Isak was born in 1863, I speculated that his father Jecheskel was born in the 1830s.  That would have put Jecheskel’s birth right into the period from ca.1821 to 1842 when Haskel and Nesche were known to be having children.  It was a bit puzzling why this birth did not appear in the Kempen records, but at that time I had not yet figured out why my great great grandmother Amalie’s “ca.1838 birth” did not appear in those records as well.  So one more undocumented child was not too much of a stretch.

There things stood from 1998 to 2013.  That was when I finally realized that Haskel would not have had a son named “Jecheskel”, because they are the same name, and Jecheskel would not have been named after his living father.  To keep things fitting together, as a place holder I just changed Isak’s father from being named Jecheskel to being an unknown son of Haskel and Nesche, making “my” Haskel (Jecheskel) LANDAU a grandfather of Isak, rather than his father.  I guessed that Isak, born in 1863, could (a) be a son of an unknown son of Haskel and Nesche, or (b) could be a previously unknown son of one of their known sons, or (c) could even be a son of one of their daughters if there was one who had married a LANDAU (and so could have had a son with the last name LANDAU).

This scenario had the added benefit of making R. Ezechiel LANDAU a great grandson of a Jecheskel LANDAU, though the one in Kempen in the 19th century, not the famous one in Prague in the 18th century.

And, according to my theory, developed from reviewing the LANDAU family history in Dr. Neil ROSENSTEIN’s “The Unbroken Chain” (2nd ed. 1990), and bolstered by the Jichus Brief prepared in 1930 by Wolf SCHEINWECHSLER for his nephew Samuel PLAWNER, this scenario also maintained Lotte’s family story that R. Ezechiel LANDAU was a descendant of the Noda b’Jehuda, R. Ezekiel LANDAU of Prague, though his great great great great great grandson, four additional generations that make the timing fit much better.
 
But that is not why I wanted to write this story.

As I have been piecing together the identity of Haskel LANDAU of Kempen as being the same person as Jecheskel, son of R. Isaak LANDAU of Wlodawa, the only resistance comes from the published statements that Isaak’s son Jecheskel LANDAU was married to a daughter of R. Joseph Samuel LANDAU (ca.1799-1836) of Kempen, whereas my great great great grandfather was married to my great great great grandmother Nesche LANDAU (b.ca.1804), daughter of R. Arjeh Jehuda Leib (Loebel) LANDAU (ca.1780-1838) of Kempen.

To accommodate Haskel being a son-in-law of R. Joseph Samuel LANDAU (and, in the process, assuming that the published and republished statement is correct), I have speculated that, after the death of Nesche, probably in the late 1850s, Haskel (b.ca.1800) remarried to Nesche’s first cousin.  And I have further speculated that this first cousin pretty much has to be Henriette (Gitel) LANDAU (b.1834, Kempen), one of only two daughters of R. Joseph Samuel LANDAU alive at his death in 1836.

Henriette LANDAU married her first cousin Josef Szyja PERETZ in Lublin in 1865 when she was about 31.  They had a daughter in 1867.  If Henriette was the second wife of Haskel LANDAU, she could have married him in the late 1850s or some time after 1867.  Given her age when she married in 1865 (31) and his age, if he married after 1867 (approaching 70), it seems more likely that this conjectured marriage would have been a first marriage for Henriette when she was in her 20s and when Haskel was a recent widower and “only” about 60 years old.

Since Henriette married (again?) in 1865, if Haskel had been married to Henriette, he presumably died shortly before that date, so ca.1864.

The only potential hitch in Haskel LANDAU dying about 1864 comes from the fact that Haskel and Nesche had no grandchildren named in memory of Haskel / Ezekiel / Jecheskel.  Of their 10 known children, only 5 are known to have lived to adulthood and had families of their own.  The first three Joseph Hirsch, Hendel and Israel Jonas had their children between 1843 and 1864.  The child born in 1864 to Israel Jonas was a girl (Rosalie).  It is not known whether the fourth one, Sara REHFISCH geb. LANDAU, had any children, but since she died in 1860, she would not have had any after Haskel may have died.  But the fifth one, Amalie BACH geb. LANDAU, my great great grandmother, had children from 1862 to 1869, with the boys having the names Emanuel (1863), Josef Hirsch (1867) and Elias (1869).  If Amalie’s father Haskel died ca.1864, why wasn’t Josef Hirsch named in memory of Haskel — or was his Hebrew name Jecheskel, despite his secular names suggesting a Hebrew name of Josef and/or Zwi?  (Perhaps Amalie’s brother Joseph Hirsch LANDAU of Groß Wartenberg died after Haskel and before Josef Hirsch BACH was born, causing Jakob and Amalie to name this son born in 1867 after her brother, rather than her father.)

But that is still not why I wanted to write this story.

The reason I wanted to write this story has to do with Lotte’s father R. Ezechiel LANDAU and his father Isak LANDAU.

If “my” Haskel LANDAU had a second marriage ca.1860 to a young woman, such as Henriette LANDAU (age ca.26), then he could have had a second family from this second marriage; maybe only one child, maybe a son; a son named Isak.  Isak LANDAU was born in 1863 in Przyrow, a village about 30 km east of Czestochowa, not so far from Kempen where Haskel was last spotted in the 1840s.

In addition, if this is “that” Haskel/Jecheskel LANDAU, then naming a son “Isak” would make sense.  Haskel would have been naming his late-born son after his father R. Isaac (b.ca.1779), formerly of Wlodawa, who was living in Tiberias in 1849 and was buried there.  R. Isaac LANDAU of Wlodawa (and Tiberias) had outlived the childbearing years of Nesche, and she and Haskel did not give the name Isaac to any of their sons born between 1821 and 1842.

This would bring Lotte’s LANDAU lineage back to the story I was told by her and others in her family;  that her father R. Ezechiel LANDAU was a son of Isak LANDAU, whose father was R. Jecheskel LANDAU of Kempen.  The seemingly too-large period between the birth of Isak (1863) and his father Haskel/Jecheskel (ca.1800) would be accommodated by Haskel having had a second marriage to a young woman who could be Isak’s mother.

And when R. Ezechiel LANDAU visited Dr. Josef Hirsch BACH in Breslau, he would have been visiting his half-uncle.

It is speculative, but it would all fit nicely, validating the family memory retained by Lotte and her family, and explaining the connection between the LANDAUs and the BACHs.