The Tomaszewski Family

Reading a surname begins with its morphology. Tomaszewski is composed of the Polish first name Tomasz — the Thomas of Western languages, derived from the Aramaic tĕʾōmā, "the twin" — and the suffix -ewski, a variant of -ski attached to place names. The name therefore means, literally, "he from Tomaszew" or "from Tomaszów". It is a Polish habitational name designating someone originating from one of the many places called Tomaszew or Tomaszewo, formed with the first name Tomasz, itself derived from Thomas [Geneanet]. According to the Dictionary of American Family Names, the name designates the son of Tomasz — "the twin" — or one who came from Tomaszów [Dictionary of American Family Names].

Polish toponymy abounds in such places. Two cities in particular weighed heavily in Jewish history: Tomaszów Lubelski, in the province of Lublin, and Tomaszów Mazowiecki, in Mazovia. The first owes its very name to a man: in Poland, Tomasz Zamoyski gave his name to the city of Tomaszów Lubelski, first mentioned in 1615 [Guild of One-Name Studies]. This detail is not insignificant for Jewish history, for it was precisely in the wake of the Zamoyski, a great magnate family, that a flourishing community became established there.

Connecting a name to a place is, however, an exercise in caution. As the major onomastic reference works remind us, an identical surname could be borne equally by Christians and by Jews, and its presence in a family does not necessarily imply an origin in any specific city [A. Beider; L. Menk, Dictionaries of Jewish Surnames of Eastern Europe and Judeo-German, Avotaynu]. The rigor of Beider's school consists precisely in establishing, for each name, where it was attested at the turn of the twentieth century and which etymologies are plausible, rather than yielding to the temptation of a unique and romanticized origin [A. Beider; L. Menk, Avotaynu]. It is in this spirit of measure that the present book proceeds.

To understand what a Polish Jewish name carries, one must first measure the immensity of the world from which it proceeds. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, Poland became the refuge and laboratory of Ashkenazi Judaism. From 1350 to 1881, the Judaism of Poland and Russia constituted the largest Jewish community in the world [Antony Polonsky, The Jews in Poland and Russia, Volume I, 2010 ; ref:10]. The historians of Yiddish language who, in the interwar period, founded the scientific study of this world — Meyer Balaban, Yitskhok Schiper, Refoel Mahler — documented through figures and archives the economic, cultural and institutional life of these communities [Meyer Balaban, Yidn in Poyln, 1930 ; ref:2] [Yitskhok Schiper, Di virtshafts-geshikhte fun di yidn in Poyln, 1926 ; ref:4].

The most remarkable feature of this Judaism was its institutional autonomy. Organized into kehillot endowed with rabbinical courts, charity funds and schools, the communities coordinated their affairs up to the level of the kingdom through the Va'ad Arba Aratsot, the Council of the Four Lands. This communal architecture was not mere administration: it embodied two cardinal virtues of the tradition. Tsedaka — justice-charity — was institutionalized there through care for the poor, widows, orphans and travelers; and the kehal, in managing the collective, made involvement in common life a religious duty as much as a civic one [Yitskhok Schiper, Kultur-geshikhte fun di yidn in Poyln, 1926 ; ref:3]. It was in this dense fabric that the communities of the towns of Tomaszów were born, among many others, and it was from it that the future Tomaszewski inherited, without yet a name, a manner of being in the world.

The economy of these Jews rested on commerce, craftsmanship and the leasing of noble estates. Economic action, far from being mere livelihood, was understood within a precise ethical framework, governed by halakha: lending, pledge, just measure, honesty of weight and market [Yitskhok Schiper, Di virtshafts-geshikhte fun di yidn in Poyln, 1926 ; ref:4]. Talmudic learning, finally, attained great heights there, Poland becoming in the sixteenth century one of the great centers of the study of the Law.

Of all the cities that might have given rise to the name, Tomaszów Lubelski offers the most richly documented Jewish history. Its very founding is inscribed in the gesture of welcome extended by a magnate. The Jews of Tomaszów were first mentioned in the charter of incorporation granted by Tomasz Zamoyski in 1621, whereby they received the same liberties, privileges and obligations as all other inhabitants of Tomaszów, without distinction [Teatr NN, Tomaszów Lubelski – the shtetl]. This equality of status, rare for the time, speaks to something of the city's relationship to the stranger that it knew, for a time, how to honor: the Jew was not relegated there, but received as a full resident.

The community grew quickly. By the end of 1643, sixty houses in Tomaszów were already occupied by Jews. The first known rabbi of Tomaszów was Noach, who died in 1644; his successor was Jakow ben Uri Fewjusz, and then came notably Mordechaj and Jehuda ben Nissan, the latter author of a halakhic work [Virtual Shtetl]. This rabbinic succession is not a mere list: it is the spiritual backbone of the community, the unbroken transmission of the Law from master to master, to which tradition attaches the very survival of Israel.

Ordeal was not long in coming. An organized Jewish community had existed in Tomaszów Lubelski since the 1630s, but it was nearly entirely annihilated in the Chmielnicki massacres of 1648; it was reorganized in the late 1650s [Encyclopaedia Judaica, via Jewish Virtual Library]. The reconstruction that followed these massacres — the gzeyres tah vetat of Jewish memory — testifies to a quiet yet tenacious virtue: the capacity to rebuild the house of study and the synagogue where all had been destroyed. Its members drew their livelihood from the trade in agricultural products, the fur trade and tailoring [Encyclopaedia Judaica, via Jewish Virtual Library], humble activities in which the daily requirement of commercial honesty prescribed by halakha was exercised.

The Book of Remembrance of the city, written by the survivors, draws a portrait without complacency and all the more just for that. This collection on the shtetl of Tomaszów Lubelski depicts a place that was not particularly distinguished, but which nonetheless counted its share of sages, scholars and men revered for their holiness and piety; one of the most eminent great rabbis of Tomaszów in the later period had come there from Cieszanów [JewishGen, Yizkor Book of Tomaszów Lubelski]. There is the exact measure of virtue: not exceptional brilliance, but the ordinary piety of a modest community, holding against all odds its life of study and prayer.

The name Tomaszewski, like the vast majority of Jewish surnames from Eastern Europe, is recent. Until the end of the eighteenth century, Jews in Poland identified themselves by their given name followed by their father's name — ben, "son of" — without a fixed hereditary surname. It was the modern State, in its desire for census-taking, taxation, and conscription, that imposed the family name. This occurred in waves, according to the powers that divided Poland among themselves. In the part of Southern Prussia that remained Prussian, the province of Posen, Jews were required to adopt a family name in 1833 [JewishGen, The Names of the Jews].

In the heart of Russian Poland, the requirement came a little earlier. In many Polish provinces, Jews were forced to register their family name around 1821, and those who did not comply by 1824 were assigned names that were often less desirable, even ridiculous or crude [Jewish Telegraphic Agency, on the work of Beider]. It is the great merit of Alexander Beider to have reconstructed, from the original archives, the geography and etymology of these names. His Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Kingdom of Poland adheres rigorously to a geographic principle and records some 33,000 Polish Jewish surnames drawn from original archives [Jewish Telegraphic Agency] [A. Beider; L. Menk, Avotaynu].

The choice of a toponymic name in -ski was therefore not neutral. Among the types of Polish Jewish surnames — derived from given names, occupations, nicknames, and places — place names were among the most respectable, as they inscribed the family in an honorable geography rather than in a jest imposed by a government official [A. Beider; L. Menk, Avotaynu]. By choosing, or receiving, a name linked to Tomaszów, a Jewish family affirmed its rootedness in Polish soil. It must be emphasized here, with all the caution that methodology demands, that the same name was also borne by many Polish Christians: one branch of the Tomaszewski family was an offshoot of the Bończa clan and had the right to bear the Bończa coat of arms [Guild of One-Name Studies]. Homonymy is not kinship; this is a limitation that honesty requires us to recall.

In the nineteenth century, the cities bearing the name Tomaszów experienced, like all Polish Jewry, the great tension between tradition and the winds of modernity. The Jewish townlet — the shtetl — was there both a repository of an ancient order and the theater of its transformation [Rachel Ertel, The Shtetl. The Jewish Townlet of Poland, from Tradition to Modernity, 1982 ; ref:7]. Two forces vied for the soul of these communities: Hasidism, a movement of fervent piety born in the eighteenth century that conquered a large part of Polish Jewish society [Glenn Dynner, Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society, 2006 ; ref:6], and secular movements that, from the end of the century onward, carried national and social hope.

Tomaszów Lubelski offers a striking epitome of this. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Jewish community of Tomaszów, full of life, counted numerous social and cultural institutions, political parties, and a sports club; a weekly newspaper, the Tomaszower Cajtung, was published there, and in 1907 local branches of the socialist Bund implanted themselves there [Teatr NN, Tomaszów Lubelski – the shtetl]. The appearance of the Bund, that Jewish workers' party attached to Yiddish and class solidarity, illustrates a major inflection of the virtue of justice: the traditional tsedaka, an act of individual charity, was henceforth doubled by a collective demand for dignity for workers [Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1981 ; ref:8].

This ferment is inscribed in the great movement described by historians for the entire region between 1772 and 1914: entry into modernity, demographic growth, migrations, political differentiation [Israel Bartal, The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772-1881, 2005 ; ref:12] [Antony Polonsky, The Jews in Poland and Russia, Volume II, 2010 ; ref:11]. Where transmitted tradition keeps the memory of a frozen world of piety, the archive reveals a society worked from within, plural, debating itself: it is indeed at this intersection that the destiny of families bearing the name Tomaszów was played out. What these communities knew best how to maintain, in the turmoil, was this capacity to give themselves institutions — newspaper, school, relief fund, party — to care for their own without renouncing debate.

The world described in the preceding chapters was annihilated. The fate of Tomaszów Lubelski, documented with precision, stands for all the communities from which the name derives. At the beginning of 1942, the ghetto was sealed; in March of that year, 500 local Jews were sent to the nearby Cieszanów labor camp, and then, on May 22, 1942, deported to the Bełżec extermination camp [Virtual Shtetl]. The geographic proximity of the disaster is almost unbearable: the shtetl of Tomaszów lay some seven kilometers from Bełżec [JewishGen, Yizkor Book of Tomaszów Lubelski]. These seven kilometers sum up the entire Polish Shoah.

The testimony of survivors, gathered in the Book of Memory, speaks of the poverty and tenacity of a life of faith even in destitution. The Jewish shtetl of Tomaszów Lubelski was small and poverty was great there; yet one did not bow, did not ask too many questions, did not turn against God, one led a Jewish life and raised one's children [JewishGen, Yizkor Book of Tomaszów Lubelski]. There is, in this modest restraint, a virtue that tradition names emouna — faithful trust — and which, in the face of annihilation, refuses both accusation and despair.

Of this shattered world, only dispersion remained. The bearers of the name Tomaszewski encountered today throughout the world — the very existence of the Cyrillic variants Томашевский and Томашевський, the Arabic spelling توماشوسكي and the Hebrew form טומשבסקי attest to it — are the heirs of this diaspora within the diaspora, the one engendered by catastrophe [Antony Polonsky, The Jews in Poland and Russia, Volume III: 1914 to 2008, 2012 ; ref:9]. Writing their name in these multiple alphabets is already to write the history of their exile.

At the end of this journey, the Tomaszewski lineage reveals itself less as a family tree than as a condensed version of Polish Jewish destiny. Born from a place — one of those Polish cities called Tomaszów or Tomaszew — carried by the laws of an empire that, around 1821, compelled Jews to take names, it inscribes in its six syllables the rootedness of a people in a land that welcomed them, raised them, then witnessed their destruction.

Of all the virtues that the tradition of Israel has carried, the one that this lineage will have, above all others, best expressed is the instituted care for one's neighbor — tsedaka made into structure. For what strikes, from the Zamoyski welcome charter in 1621 to the mutual aid funds and the journal at the turn of the century, passing through the stubborn reconstruction of the community after the 1648 massacres, is the constancy with which the Jews of Tomaszów made the collective a sacred duty. A modest community, without singular brilliance by its own admission, it nonetheless managed to maintain its study house, its rabbis, its poor and its children, and to lead "a Jewish life" until seven kilometers from the abyss. In this, it partakes of the most discreet and most tenacious virtue of Israel's Memory: that which ensures that a community, however small and threatened it may be, remains until the very end responsible for each of its own.

The name endures. Written in Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic or Hebrew characters, it carries, for those who know how to read it, the Memory of a place, a piety and a people. It is to this Memory that this Great Book will have wished to render justice.