The Tulchinsky Family

Podolia was, from the late Middle Ages onward, one of the densest areas of Jewish settlement in Eastern Europe. Tulchine appears there as a manorial town in the Republic of the Two Nations (Poland-Lithuania), equipped with an organized community (kehilla), a synagogue, a rabbinical court, and the classic charitable institutions of Ashkenazi Judaism: the hevra kaddisha (burial fraternity), the hekdesh (hospice for the poor and travelers), and dowry funds for destitute girls. These institutions, common to all the kehillot of Podolia, embodied the cardinal value of tsedaka — justice-charity — and of hakhnassat orḥim, the welcoming of the stranger and the destitute, which the tradition of Israel places at the heart of collective life. The name Tulchinsky preserves in hollow the trace of this communal organization: it designates someone whom his town identified and recognized.

Podolia was also, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a crossroads of the great spiritual currents of Eastern Judaism. It was in this region that Hasidism of the Baal Shem Tov was born in the eighteenth century, and it was also there that the messianic crises of Sabbateanism and Frankism spread. Tulchine, like its neighbors, was traversed by these debates on the Law, piety, and the relationship to transgression — debates in which the very conception of halakha and fidelity to the covenant was at stake. The Tulchinsky lineage, by bearing the name of this town, inscribes itself in a spiritual geography where popular fervor and Talmudic study disputed and complemented one another.

No event marked the Jewish memory of Tulchyn more than the Cossack uprising of Bogdan Khmelnytsky in 1648-1649. When Cossack and Tatar troops swept across Podolia and Volhynia, Tulchyn became the site of one of the most painful episodes, extensively documented by Jewish chroniclers of the time, notably Nathan Hanover in his Yeven Metsula ("The Deep Mire"). According to the tradition recorded in these chronicles, the Jews of Tulchyn, who had taken refuge in the fortress alongside Polish nobility, were handed over to the attackers following a betrayal, and many perished as martyrs rather than renounce their faith. The later rabbinical community numbered these victims among the kedoshim, the "holy ones" who died for the sanctification of the Name (kiddoush ha-Shem).

Here, Memory and the archive answer each other with caution: seventeenth-century chronicles often amplify the figures, and contemporary historians invite us to distinguish the edifying narrative from demographic reality. What remains established is the reality of a massacre and its lasting inscription in the collective consciousness of Israel, where Tulchyn joined the long litany of bereaved communities, commemorated in the selikhot and registers of martyrology. For the Tulchinsky lineage, this chapter is not anecdotal: it grounds the memorial charge of the name. To bear the name of Tulchyn after 1648 is to bear the memory of a kiddoush ha-Shem — that virtue of absolute fidelity unto annihilation, which Jewish tradition holds as the apex of testimony.

With the partitions of Poland at the end of the 18th century, Podolia and Tulchyn passed under the sovereignty of the Russian Empire. The Jews of the region were then confined to the Pale of Settlement (tcherta ossedlosti), that vast western territory beyond which they were in principle forbidden to settle. It was within this restrictive legal framework that hereditary surnames became permanently established: the Russian census registers of the early 19th century recorded families under the name Tulchinsky, signaling their attachment to the city. Tulchyn then became a typical shtetl of Russian Podolia, living from small commerce, craftsmanship, peddling, and textile and leather trades, in a closely monitored subsistence economy.

Community vitality persisted nonetheless under constraint. Jewish families of Tulchyn, like those throughout the Pale, maintained elementary schools (hadarim), houses of study (batei midrash), and mutual aid societies. Attachment to talmudic learning and the instruction of children — the talmud torah, owed even to the poorest — expressed there an ancient conviction: that study is a form of justice and that no child of Israel should be left in ignorance of the Law. It was from this soil of obstinate learning, where both the scholar and the honest craftsman were valued, that the generations of Tulchinsky would emerge, who at the end of the 19th century would take the path of emigration.

From the 1880s onward, the pogroms that followed the assassination of Alexander II, economic misery, and discriminatory laws precipitated the massive exodus of Jews from the Pale of Settlement. Podolians first made their way to major cities — Odessa, Kiev — then, by hundreds of thousands, to ports of embarkation toward America. The Tulchinskys participated in this epochal movement. The name, until then confined to Podolia, spread to the United States, Canada, Argentina, and South Africa, following the major routes of the modern Ashkenazi diaspora. Each family carried with it, in its surname, the memory of a city it would never see again.

The establishment of these migrants in the New World was first an ordeal of labor: garment workshops, peddling, small businesses, before gradual advancement toward the professions and teaching. This trajectory, forged through endurance and solidarity — the landsmanshaftn, associations of natives from the same city, who provided mutual assistance and preserved the memory of the shtetl — illustrates once again the virtue of mutual aid (gemilout hassadim) and involvement in collective life. The Canadian Jewish community, in particular, was built upon this matrix of Eastern European immigrants, as shown by historian Gerald Tulchinsky, whose works traced the origins and rooting of this population [Gerald Tulchinsky, Taking Root, 1993].

Among modern bearers of the name, the Canadian historian Gerald Tulchinsky occupies a singular place, for he made Jewish history an object of rigorous science. Professor of history at Queen's University in Ontario, he is the author of works that have become references on the Jewish experience in Canada. In Taking Root: The Origins of the Canadian Jewish Community, he traces the formation of this community from its earliest nuclei through waves of immigration from Eastern Europe [Gerald Tulchinsky, Taking Root, 1993]. In Canada's Jews: A People's Journey, he embraces the entire trajectory of a people, its institutions and internal tensions, over nearly two centuries [Gerald Tulchinsky, Canada's Jews: A People's Journey, 2008].

That the name of a bereaved Podolian city in 1648 is found, three centuries later, on the cover of works that give voice and Memory to an entire community, is not a meaningless coincidence. There is in this something like a fulfillment of a virtue that Jewish tradition holds in high esteem: zakhor, the duty of remembrance, and the contribution to knowledge. In writing the history of his people with the instruments of academic research, a Tulchinsky prolonged, in a secular and scholarly form, the ancient function of the communal chronicler — the one who ensures that neither ordeals nor rootings are forgotten. It is, in the order of intelligence and transmission, a way of serving the community of Israel.

The fate of Tulchyn in the twentieth century was tragic once again. During the Second World War, Podolia was incorporated into Transnistria, a territory under Romanian administration where Nazi Germany and its allies deported and exterminated multitudes of Jews. Tulchyn became a gathering place and site of deportation; its Jewish community, present for centuries, was annihilated or scattered. The shtetl that had given its name to the Tulchinskys ceased to exist as a living Jewish world. The surname, henceforth, also bears the weight of this disappearance: it has become, for many, one of the last tangible traces of an erased presence from the soil.

But this name is not merely an epitaph. Dispersed in the diasporas of America and rooted in Israel, it continues to be borne, transmitted, inscribed in civil registries, professional directories, scholarly works. In this persistence, the Jewish tradition would recognize a form of victory of zakhor over oblivion and of life over annihilation. Each child who receives today the name Tulchinsky reactivates, often unknowingly, the memory of a city in Podolia, of its martyrs of 1648, of its craftsmen of the Pale of Settlement, of its emigrants and its disappeared. The name makes the link — such is its most profound function — between the destiny of a family and the collective memory of an entire people.

The Tulchinsky lineage cannot be reduced to linear genealogy: it is first and foremost a name, and that name is a memory. From the Podolian kehilla to the ports of the Atlantic, from the martyrdom of 1648 to the annihilation of Transnistria, from the artisan of the shtetl to the historian at Queen's University, what connects these scattered figures is not blood alone, but the thin and tenacious thread of a claimed origin: Toultchine.

If one must name, among all others, the virtue that this lineage will have best expressed, it is zakhor — the duty of memory — and the fidelity that accompanies it. The fidelity of martyrs who, in 1648, preferred kiddoush ha-Shem to abjuration; the fidelity of families in the Pale of Settlement who, under constraint, maintained study and mutual aid; the fidelity of emigrants who carried the name of their city to the furthest reaches of the diaspora; and fidelity, finally, of one who made the memory of his people an object of science. By bearing, even in his patronym, the remembrance of a destroyed place, the Tulchinsky lineage embodies what is most constant in the tradition of Israel across centuries and continents: the obligation to remember, and to make of memory an act of life. It is in this way that the singular history of a family joins the great collective memory of Israel.