The long road to the Promised Land, the title of this blog, is particularly fitting when it comes to my family. As my late mother told me the story, the road began in Spain, where her family lived for centuries. The family, whose last name was Lamed, probably arrived after fleeing Judea from the Romans. The name Lamed comes from the Hebrew word to study or to teach. Chances are they were teachers.
The Lameds fled Spain from the Spanish Inquisition at the end of the 15th century, making their way to Holland, and from there to Germany. Perhaps to disguise their origin, they changed their name by reversing it, from Lamed to Demal, which became Themal over time.
In the course of centuries the Themals moved across Germany, eventually settling in Posen, a province the Germans had taken decades earlier from the Poles. It became known as the Polish corridor, south of the free city of Danzig. My mother, Helene, was born in Posen in 1900, and it was there that she met my father.
My Father’s family, the Davids, are descendants of a woman who lived in the town of Hameln, outside of Hamburg, Germany, in the 18th century. Her sons published her memoir, which described the lifestyle of Jewish people in Germany in her time. The book eventually was translated into English under the title of “The Happy Woman of Hameln.”
Over time, the Davids, like the Themals, moved east, settling in Posen. It was there that my father, Martin Mordechai, was born in 1896.
When Germany lost World War I, the two families, along with many other Jews, fled from the Polish conquerors to Berlin, the capital of the Motherland. Posen became Poznan, which it is to this day. My parents were married in Berlin in 1927. I was born two years later.
The irony that German Jews considered themselves fully Germans, participating in the government and in the military, came to the fore with the rise of Hitler to power in 1933.
My parents and I fled to Paris, France, where we lived from 1933 to 1935. That year my parents decided to seek refuge in the Promised Land. I grew up in Tel Aviv. Within two years the rest of the David family arrived in what was then Palestine - my father’s mother and his brother and sister. The wandering of the Davids had ended.
Apart from my mother, the Themals were not as lucky. Her brother and her uncle were trapped in Germany. They spent the World War II years in hiding, often with the help of Christian friends. For a while they shared a room in back of a pet shop in Berlin, owned by these friends, where they worked by day. And they survived.
After the war, my uncle, his wife and her son from a previous marriage - the Nazis had killed her first husband - arrived in the Promised land. So ended the Hagira of a branch of the Themal family, some 450 years after they fled from Spain.
But...my uncle, Rolf Themal, was unable to make a living in the Promised Land. He didn’t know the language and didn’t like living in what was once an Arab village. After a couple of years the Themals returned to Berlin. There, Rolf Themal found a very fulfilling job. He became head of the office which prosecuted Nazis.
The Davids trace their roots to Moses and Aaron, who belonged to the Israelite tribe of Levi. My father’s gravestone carries the inscription, “Mordechai son of Jacob the Levi.” The Levis were the priests who served in the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, of which only the Western Wall remains.
For my father, landing on the Mediterranean shores of The Promised Land some 1600 years after the Romans destroyed the Temple where his ancestors served, was surely taking the long road.
The Judeans had fled. Now they are back. To stay.
