In continuation of their work on the theory of the origin of geniuses, which postulates that talents do not come from nowhere, experts at the Am haZikaron Institute examined the family trees of famous artists.
DOUGLASES – DANILEVICHES FROM BELARUS
For Michael Douglas, June 2015 was a time of emotional personal discovery. In Israel, at a meeting with former President Shimon Peres and Natan Shcharansky, chairman of the Jewish Agency, the American actor, director and producer received a priceless gift – a genealogical tree of his family. Specialists of the Israeli Institute “Am haZikaron” researched the history of the Douglas family for more than three hundred years – up to 1700, found the founders of the great acting dynasty in Eastern Europe, and following the family name, reached the prophet from the tribe of Yehuda.
As you know, the real name of Michael’s father, Kirk Douglas, is Isser Danilevich (Izya Danilovich). He was born in the small town of Amsterdam in the suburbs of New York, in a non-wealthy Jewish family. His parents Hershl Danilovich and Bryna Danilovich (née Sangrel) emigrated to the United States from the town of Chausy, Mogilev Province, after marrying at the very beginning of the 20th century.
“Danilevich” refers to the so-called “patronymic” Jewish surnames, that is, formed from male personal names. As a rule, such a name was the name of the father or grandfather, but it was not accidental, but an ancestral – “dynastic” name, passed from generation to generation. In different communities the traditions of naming children were somewhat different, but in all Jewish families there were names that appeared constantly, with a certain periodicity.
By the sound of a “patronymic” surname, it is possible to determine which name in a given family has been part of the dynastic set for generations.
The surname Danilevich comes from the male Tanachic name Daniel, which in Hebrew means “G-d is my judge”.
In the Tanakh, Daniel was a prophet who came from a noble family of the tribe of Yehudah. When Jerusalem was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar’s hordes, Daniel, along with other noble Jews, was taken to Babylon. Later, being at the court of the Babylonian king Belshazzar (Belshazzar), he alone was able to explain the mysterious inscription, which was inscribed by an invisible hand on the wall of the palace where the king was feasting with his retainers. For this interpretation Daniel was richly rewarded and appointed one of the three co-rulers of the Babylonian state.
Another famous bearer of this name is mentioned in the Talmud. He was Rabbi Daniel bar Ketina, a Babylonian teacher of the law. Rabbi Daniel was called “the holy righteous man”. According to legend, he used to inspect his garden every day and mark the beds that needed moisture, after which he would start pouring rain and moisten only those he had marked. Rabbi Daniel’s righteousness and love of gardens was inherited by his distant descendants.
In the Middle Ages, the name Daniel appeared in the Jewish communities of Italy. This family name was borne by prominent personalities – the famous Italian physicians Daniel ben Shlomo and Daniel ben Shmuel ben Daniel a-Dayan, rabbis and celebrated liturgical poets Daniel ben Yehuda, Daniel ben Yehiel of Montalcino and Daniel ben Yehiel of Rome.
In the 16th century, bearers of this generic name among many Italian Jews migrated from Italy to Eastern Europe, and the name Daniel came into use in the Jewish communities of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
The direct ancestor of the actor was a certain Daniel, born in what is now Poland in the early 18th century. His son, Jacob ben Daniel, was born already in Grodno, which later passed to Russia and became a Belarusian city.
The family name later turned into a hereditary nickname, and then into a surname: it was assigned in accordance with the tsar’s decree of December 9, 1804, according to which every Jew had to adopt a hereditary surname by which he would be referred to in all official papers. The surname was written down (depending on the literacy of the scribe) as Danel, Danil, Danilov, Danilevich, Danilovich, Danilovich or Danielovich.
There were quite a few famous people in this family. For example, the famous Jewish philanthropist of the second half of the 19th century, Kalman Danilevich from Nesvizh, whose son Yehuda-Leib went to Eretz Yisrael and became a pioneer settler, one of the founders of Rehovot, and whose grandson was one of the founders of other Israeli towns – Yokneam and Gan Yavneh. Another of Kalman’s grandsons, Yitzhak Danieli, was one of the first Haganah fighters in Rehovot. But he devoted most of his life, like his ancestor, the Babylonian lawgiver Rabbi Daniel, to agriculture – planting and cultivating citrus and plum orchards.
Another son of Kalman – Michael Douglas’ great-grandfather, Iser Danilevich moved to Chausy. There the family opened a successful carriage business. The Danilevichs were engaged in the transportation of people and goods, and owned a considerable number of horses, wagons and phaetons. Until the beginning of the 20th century, when another – American – story began in the family’s history. And if the director had not advised the student Iza Danilevich to change his name to a more understandable one in the USA, the world would have soon recognized the great acting dynasty of the Danileviches, not the Douglases.
STREISAND FROM UKRAINE
The great American actress and singer Barbra Streisand was convinced that the roots of her family were to be found in Vienna. However, the Am haZikaron Institute found her ancestors much further east, in the small town of Berezhany near Tarnopol in western Ukraine. Until 1920, this was Austro-Hungarian territory, which is probably where the family misconception about the Viennese origins of the family came from.
Barbara was stunned by the news of her Ukrainian roots. According to her agent, after receiving her family’s family tree as a gift, she set up a poster in her office to look at it. On the day Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, the actress wrote her famous post, “My paternal grandparents emigrated from Ukraine and my heart breaks for the courageous people there fighting this Russian invasion. Putin’s propaganda about “denazification” as justification is one of the greatest deceptions of this century.”
Support for Ukraine for Barbra Streisand has found not only a universal basis, but also a personal one.
KOEN FROM LITHUANIA
Leonard Cohen, one of the world’s most famous singers, has never hidden his Jewishness. His very name breathes Jewish history. The name Leonard was given to him in honor of his great-grandfather Lazarus (Eliezer) Cohen, one of the first Canadian Jews, who came in 1860 from the Lithuanian village of Budvichiai, near Vilkavishkis. The singer’s surname indicates that he is a member of a clan of priests – in Hebrew, “kohen” – descended from the biblical high priest Aaron, who lived about three and a half thousand years ago. Leonard says he tried on the spiritual role of the High Priest rebuilding the Temple. Sometimes he would give the audience at his concerts an “Aaronic blessing” from the Torah, reciting the text in Hebrew and raising his palms.
Even during his fascination with Buddhism, Cohen continued to say that he was not looking for a new religion and was quite happy with the old one, Judaism, once writing a violent protest when someone called him a Buddhist rather than a Jew. Finally, in his 1985 interview, Leonard said that “his heart was circumcised according to Jewish custom.” This expression, taken from the Torah, means a sensual openness to one’s surroundings, and indeed, Cohen’s songs are strikingly powerful and naked. And if that’s not enough – Leonard Cohen in 1973, during the Doomsday War, gave for a month, sometimes in the shelling zone, an incredible load of free 6-8 concerts a day to support the Israeli soldiers.
Such a strong Jewish self-identification is not accidental. Leonard was born in Montreal to a family of true “Litvaks. Generations of these orthodox Jews with roots in Lithuania scrupulously study Torah and Talmud. For them it is much more prestigious to know the Talmud “on a needle”, i.e. to be able to tell what word is at the end of a 5,422-page Talmud by sticking a needle into it, than to be, for example, the richest industrialist. And this is not a metaphor – knowledge of the Talmud “on a needle” has been documented by scholars. Leonard Cohen’s maternal grandfather, Rabbi Shlomo Klonitsky, was just such a scholarly Jew. He was born in the Belarusian town of Drohiczyn, and studied in the Lithuanian city of Kovno (Kaunas) under the most famous rabbi of his time, Yitzhak Elhanan Spector. It was he who closed his outstanding teacher’s eyes when he passed away, as Leonard Cohen tells us in an interview with Arthur Kurzweil. Shlomo became the director of a yeshiva in Kaunas, he married a local Jewish woman there, and Leonard’s mother Masha was born there in 1905. Upon his arrival in Canada, Shlomo published a commentary on the Talmud, “Otsar Taamei Chazal” and became known for his brilliant command of the language as Sar HaDikduki, “Minister of Grammar.”
Cohen’s father’s side, Nathan, is also descended from a rabbi – Yehuda aCohen Budwicher, Leonard’s great-great-great-grandfather. The rabbi was known for his piety, philanthropy and Talmudic knowledge – abilities that would distinguish his descendants in Montreal. Yehuda’s son Chaim begat 7 sons, the “Budwitcher brothers,” who became famous for their success. Thus Tzvi Hirsch became a rabbi, having studied in the most prestigious Volozhin yeshiva under the guidance of the famous rabbi of Berlin. Moving to Montreal, together with Lazarus and his son Lion, Leonard’s grandfather, whose name is an adaptation of the Jewish name of the founder of the family, Yehuda, they established the first Zionist organization, a foundation to support indigent Jews and a synagogue – the same synagogue that Leonard Cohen went to for the rest of his life and with whose cantor he collaborated in his last album. The influence of Leonard Cohen’s family on Montreal’s Jewish community cannot be overstated.
Surprising but true. A long period of Leonard Cohen’s life was devoted to a spiritual search for himself in non-Jewish practices, from Scientology to Buddhism. It was, in his own words, caused by the lack in Cohen’s orthodox “Litvak” upbringing of what Hasidism had introduced into Jewish thought. Judaism once experienced a veritable war between the Litvaks and the Hasidim, who believed that service of the heart, which consists of attaining states of consciousness in which the Hasid feels a connection to the Creator, is much more important than scholarship. Leonard, speaking of Hasidism, refers to Buber with his “Hasidic Tales”.
Cohen believed that conventional Judaism was wrong to relegate the events of the TaNaKh to the realm of miracles inaccessible to the modern generation. Prophecy is as accessible to us as it was to our ancestors, and messianism and meditative techniques are necessary.
At the end of his search, Leonard found everything he was looking for in Judaism and returned to the observance of Jewish tradition in the form he himself had developed. Leonard Cohen died a religious Jew.