Down the Genealogy Rabbit-hole

 Over the years, people have often asked me if my father the rabbi came from a rabbinical family. If he was part of a long lineage of rabbis. I would always answer that probably not. My father's immediate family wasn't particularly observant.

This photo of my father leading birkat-hamazon at his cousin's wedding, with the married couple, doing their best to hide their "OMG HOW LONG IS THIS JEWISH STUFF GOING TO TAKE???" expressions on their faces and Uncle Bernie not even bothering to try to hide his boredom and my father doing his best to do right by birkat ha mazon just about sums my father's sense of his family's connection to the rabbinical.

I do remember my father telling me about how he learned to love to study Jewish texts from his grandfather

Sam Cohen.

 Sam (Issachar) Cohen, born in Kalish Poland had studied in Yeshivah before coming to New York. There was a family legend about him studying with Akiva Eger or at his yeshiva  except that the timing is off because 

Akiva Eger died in 1837 and my great grandfather was born in 1872.

I had assumed that discovering much of anything about Sam Cohen would be nearly impossible because both Sam and Cohen are such incredibly common names. However, Sam's wife, Leah had a less common surname, Kolsky.

Sam Cohen and Leah Kolsky

I was able to find the record for their 1899 marriage here in New York. 

Looking at that record, for the first time, I saw the names of Sam Cohen's parents, Abraham Cohen and Aydel Traubenberg. Using the wonderful databases at JRI Poland I discovered that Aydel's father was Issachar Traubenberg, rabbi in the little town of Zogorow outside of Kalisz.

Issachar was born in 1793. Every civic document I saw connected to Issachar Traubenberg listed him as a rabbi. Issachar is actually of the right age to have studied with Akiva Eger when the great rabbi had moved to that neck of the woods.

You can read a little about the Jewish community of Zogorow.

Please note the size of the Jewish population.

Year	General population	Jews
1808	827	21
1827	1,537	178
1857	1,728	233
1864	2,148	551
1897	2,980	658
1921	3,715	807
1.9.1939	(?)	ca. 630

Poking around I discovered that there was at least one other rabbi in the town in the 1840s. and 50s. The other rabbi was a Ger Chassid. I would be willing to wager a large amount of money that my ancestor was not a Chassid, neither a Ger Chassid nor a Kotsker Chassid ( those were the popular varieties of Chassidut in the area.)

I am beyond tickled that like my father, Issachar Traubenberg was the rabbi of a small town outside of a larger town famous for its Jewish community and scholarship. My father, like his ancestor, was the father of only daughters.

I have been learning a little bit about the history of this area around Kalisz. It was on the border between Germany and Poland and Polish Russia. There was a tremendous amount of political upheaval during the lifetime of Issachar Traubenberg with Germany and either Poland or Russia fighting over that bit of land and making life difficult for whoever wasn't in power. 

One of the reasons such meticulous records were kept about marriages and births was that there was an official desire to keep the size of the Jewish population down. Jewish men from outside the area were discouraged from/not allowed to settle in the region. Jewish women from outside the area were permitted to marry Kalisz area men.

I feel like I am looking through a telescope into my family's past. My father would have been truly tickled to learn about his grandfather's grandfather, Issachar Traubenberg.