All Named Avraham

All Named Avraham

This exhibit was assembled, by accident, around a single first name. Twenty-two rabbis appear in the photographs that follow. Akshtain in Budapest in 1899. Yehoshua Heshel of Mezhybizh in 1919. Kahana Shapiro at the opening of the Lithuanian parliament. David Horowitz at a refugee camp in 1944.

The surnames they share with their fathers and grandfathers belong to dynasties — Belz, Plonsk, Karlin, Spinka, Kopyczynce, Sadigora — that were Eastern European words before they became memorial words. The first names they all share are the same: Avraham. The accident of the corpus is that it became, by following one name across forty-five years, a portrait of the rabbinic world that ended.

Budapest, 1899

The earliest photograph in this collection shows Rabbi Avraham Eliezer Akshtain, a judge of the rabbinical court of Budapest, in the years before the First World War. The Habsburg Empire still stretches from Trieste to Galicia. The dynasties of Belz, Sadigora, and Mezhybizh are not yet legends. They are addresses.

Mezhybizh

Rabbi Avraham Yehoshua Heshel — descendant of the Apter Rav, of a line that traced itself, in this very town, back to the Baal Shem Tov. The court of Mezhybizh is more than a century old when this photograph is taken. Six rabbis bearing variants of his name will appear in the records that follow: in Vienna, in Kopyczynce, in Sadigora, in Tarnopol.

The cousinly geography of the rabbinic dynasty was also a map of Galicia: every town a court, every court a name. At left, Avraham Yehoshua Heshel rides through Vienna in a carriage with his uncle Yisrael Friedman of Husiatyn, and across from them his brother. At right, decades later, Heshel of Kopyczynce stands beside his brother-in-law Avraham Yaakov of Sadigora.

The American Crossing — 1924

In the spring of 1924, Rabbi Avraham Aharon Yudlovitz crossed the Atlantic and stood at the White House in Washington beside Rabbi Gabriel Ze'ev Margalit. The journey was part of a campaign to save the great yeshivot of Eastern Europe. Behind that single photograph are months of fundraising, immigration testimonies, Yiddish newspapers in Brooklyn, and dinners in Pittsburgh and Cleveland.

Kovno

Rabbi Avraham Dov Kahana Shapiro — Chief Rabbi of Lithuania. At left, in 1923, he travels to America with Rabbi Moshe Mordechai Epstein and Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook on the same yeshiva-rescue campaign. At right, in Kaunas, he stands as the rabbinic representative on the dais at the opening of the Lithuanian parliament. The republic he addressed lasted fifteen years.

Warsaw, 1929

Rabbi Aharon Rokeach of Belz arrives in Warsaw for the rabbinical assembly. Belz: the most populous Hasidic court in Galicia, with tens of thousands of followers. The Belzer Rebbe will escape Eastern Europe in 1944 and reach the Land of Israel. The dynasty survives him. Most of the men in the photographs around this one will not.

The Late Thirties

Vienna, Lugano, Karlin, Strasbourg, Mezhybizh. By the late 1930s the rabbis who shared a name shared a continent that was about to fall away from under them.

27 June 1938 — Lublin

The Celebration of the Torah at Yeshivas Chachmei Lublin. The yeshiva, founded by Rabbi Meir Shapiro in 1930, was the largest Talmudic academy in Europe, with the largest Talmudic library on the continent. Fifteen months after this photograph was taken, the German army entered Lublin. The building was confiscated. The library was lost. This photograph survived. Most of the men in it did not.

She'erit HaPleita

In the years after the war, in the displaced-persons camp at Föhrenwald in occupied Germany — known to its residents as She'erit HaPleita, the surviving remnant — Rabbi Avraham David Horowitz, Av Beit Din of Strasbourg, sits in conversation with Rabbi Yekutiel Yehuda Halberstam of Sanz-Klausenburg. The conversation is being held in a barracks. The conversation is about how to live afterward.

אברהם · Avraham