Author: Freddy Rotman
Translated by Lena Lores
Jews always took part in the Polish nation’s struggle for liberation from foreign rule. First through appeals and street demonstrations, and later through armed action, Jews shed blood shoulder to shoulder with the patriots of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. After the suppression of three Polish uprisings, the sons of Israel went with the Poles to the gallows and to the tsar’s prisons, and were forced to leave their homes and shtetls.
One of Poland’s outstanding heroes, in whose honor streets in various cities are named, was the Chief Rabbi of Kraków and Warsaw, Dov Ber Meisels.
Dov Ber Meisels was born in Poland, in the town of Szczekociny, in 1798. His family later moved from Silesia to the Ukrainian city of Kamianets-Podilskyi, where Meisels received a traditional Jewish education and became, like his father, a rabbi. In 1820 he married the daughter of Zalman Bornstein, a wealthy lessee of salt mines, and in 1832 became Chief Rabbi of Kraków. In matters of faith he was an ardent opponent of the Hasidim and their tzaddikim.
A year before moving to the ancient Polish capital, in 1831, Dov Ber Meisels became a trusted agent of the emissary of the Warsaw National Government in the Free City of Kraków, Count Ludwik Morstin. With substantial income from the bank he and his father-in-law had established, and drawing on his wide contacts among the nobility, Rabbi Meisels purchased arms and ammunition for the Polish insurgents.
In 1846 he took part in the Kraków Uprising, and two years later fervently supported the revolutionary events in Europe known as the “Spring of Nations.” Rabbi Meisels called on all supporters of an independent Poland to ensure equality for Jews and took an active part in the Galician-Polish delegation in Vienna. Before being elected to the Austrian parliament, he declared that he would represent all voters, not only Jews.
After the annexation of the Free City of Kraków by the Austrian Empire, Rabbi Meisels lost his property and influence in Kraków. He moved to Russian territory—to Warsaw—where he was offered the vacant post of Chief Rabbi. Meisels became the rabbi of a major city, yet he continued to sign as “Rabbi of Kraków, residing in Warsaw,” for Kraków remained the most important center of Judaism.
It was 1861. In Warsaw, patriotic protests against Russian rule intensified, prompted by church holidays and anniversaries of Polish military glory.
In response, the Russian authorities tightened their terror against local patriots. Cossacks, pursuing demonstrators, herded them into churches and brutally assaulted people inside the sanctuaries themselves. In protest, the Catholic clergy closed all the city’s churches.
Prominent Warsaw rabbis Markus Jastrow and Isaac Kramsztyk immediately responded. Led by Meisels, these religious authorities at once joined the protest and, in solidarity, closed all Warsaw synagogues.
Under Meisels’s leadership, Jews took part in numerous religious and patriotic demonstrations in Warsaw. Unlike the religious liberals Jastrow and Kramsztyk, Meisels was the leader of the Orthodox—the majority of the Jewish community—and his participation in actions against the Russian occupiers was especially valued by the public. Among Warsaw’s Christian population, Rabbi Meisels and his associates Markus Jastrow and Isaac Kramsztyk earned genuine renown.
To break the vicious circle of violence in some way, a City Delegation (Delegacja Miejska) was established in Warsaw in February 1861—a committee of prominent townspeople who sought, through negotiations with the Russian administration, to stabilize the situation. Meisels joined the City Delegation as a representative of the entire local Jewish community.
The rabbi’s popularity was also greatly enhanced by his participation in the ecumenical funeral of five victims—participants in the anti-Russian demonstration in Warsaw on March 2, 1861. The event was masterfully commemorated by the outstanding Polish artist of Jewish origin, Aleksander Lesser.
In Lesser’s painting, the central figure of the funeral ceremony is the Catholic Bishop of Warsaw, Antoni Melchior Fiałkowski. Beside him stand clergymen of various faiths: on one side Rabbis Jastrow and Kramsztyk led by Warsaw’s Chief Rabbi Meisels, and on the other side ministers of different Christian denominations.
After the funeral ceremony at Old Powązki—the ancient Warsaw necropolis—the rabbis took part in a mourning procession through the city streets.
Marcus Jastrow was arrested for taking part in this patriotic event and imprisoned in the Warsaw Citadel, in its notorious Pavilion X, where Polish patriots and revolutionaries were held. Three months later he was expelled to Prussia.
Later, Marcus Jastrow became one of the founders of Conservative Judaism. Living in the United States of America, he was one of the editors of the first Jewish Encyclopedia (1901–1906) and the author of the two-volume A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds, and the Midrashic Literature (1886–1903).
Rabbi Isaac Kramsztyk was also arrested and thrown into prison, and then deported from the Kingdom of Poland. After the January Uprising of 1863, Kramsztyk was arrested again and exiled to Siberia. He returned to Warsaw in May 1867 and, in addition to his synagogue duties, continued working in journalism and legal practice. Isaac Kramsztyk went down in history as the first person to begin teaching the Talmud in the Polish language. His direct descendant is the contemporary Polish publicist and renowned philosopher, Professor Jan Hartman of the Jagiellonian University.
Rabbi of Warsaw Dov Ber Meisels shared the fate of his fellow Jews and was also imprisoned in the Warsaw Citadel. In January 1863 he warmly welcomed the uprising against tsarism, and after its defeat he was deported to Galicia as an Austrian subject.
Before his death, he managed to return to Warsaw, where he later died in 1878. His solemn funeral became yet another occasion for a patriotic demonstration by the people of Warsaw—Poles and Jews—united in open defiance of tsarist despotism.
12.12.2020
Dov Ber Meisels
1798 – 1870
