Family genealogy
My family Landscape
In my father's youth, the Landschaft family was already a large family: Her mother had 11 children, 7 girls and 4 boys. The third children, Jakob-Szmul, died when he was one year and half. That,s the reason why my father was called Szmul.
My father told us that his maternal grandfather had 7 stones to put away!
What my father remembered was that the Landschaft family came from Russia. Their migration to Polish lands must have dated back to the establishment of the Pale of Settlement. Catherine II of Russia forced almost all Jews living in the Russian Empire to relocate to a territory between the Baltic and Black Seas, encompassing Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Moldova.
My Landschaft ancestors settled in a small sthetl Klimontow,in the suburbs of Sedziszow, a few kilometers from Jedrzejow, in the district of Kielce.
When they had to migrate, the city of Jedrzejow did not admit Jews.
They were able to settle in this small shtetl well before 1862, the year in which Tsar Alexander II imposed major reforms on the Empire: the abolition of serfdom (1861), a major judicial reform, and another
Education was reformed, followed by military service (reduced from 25 to 6 years). It broadened the possibility for Jews to settle outside the Pale of Settlement, and economic and educational restrictions against Jews were lifted. The assassination of the Tsar in 1881 triggered anti-Jewish pogroms throughout Russia. Jews were the designated scapegoats in the face of growing dissent within the empire.
But it does not appear that the Landschaft family was a victim in their little corner of Poland.
My father knew that his family lived in Klimontow.
I also found this name in the story of Sabina, Henri's niece.
I had trouble finding the location of Klimontow, as there are several in Poland: a small village in the province of Lodz, another near Sandomierz (but no reference to Landschaft in these places) and I finally spotted a Klimontow, not far from Jedrzejow, near Sedziszow (28km).
In fact, Klimontow is about 32km from Jedrzejow.
Several Landschaft families lived in Jedrzejow, including Henri's father (my father's first cousin, whom he met in Munich and Paris after the war, before settling in Frankfurt).
This chart, taken from Jedrzejow's Yiskor Book, shows that the Jewish population settled in the city between 1882 and 1897, when the ban on Jewish residence was lifted. By 1939, they represented one-third of the population.
Apparently my grandmother Perele Landschaft's parents stayed in Klimontow and the young Czalczynski couple came to settle there according to my father.
What I have been able to establish about the family history
I was able to trace the Landszaft ancestors back to the end of the 18th century, in the registers of Checiny and Wodzislaw.
It appears that Wodzislaw was the religious and administrative center for the Jews who lived in this region.
By joining the CRARG (research group of the Czestochowa-Radomsko region) which centralizes, among other things, the documents of the cities of the Wodzislaw region, Kielce, Jedreszjow, Wloszczowa... I was able to reconstruct the Landszaft family, whose spelling varied according to the writer.
Almost all of my grandmother's family appears in the Wodzislaw records: deaths, including the oldest ancestors, births, all of Majer and Ruchla's children, and some marriages, partly those that took place in this religious district.
I have confirmation, through the birth certificate of the first child of Perla Landszaft and Kasriel Czalczynski, Mayer-Berek, in 1911, that the young couple lived in, or near, Klimontow.
I also received confirmation, from several documents, that the Klimontow of the Landszaft family was indeed located in the municipality of Sedziszow and was dependent on the municipality of Mstyczow.
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My father remembered the first names of his nine uncles and aunts, and I was able to trace their families. However, he never mentioned an eleventh child who had died, whose name he inherited.
And what astonished my father the most was that a member of each of these families survived the Holocaust. Out of at least 150 people, only about a dozen remained alive.
