The Unbroken Chain: Interview with Jewish Genealogy Expert Dr. Neil Rosenstein

Dr. Neil Rosenstein is the author of The Unbroken Chain, a massive and groundbreaking work that explores world Jewry’s “rabbinical royalty” going back 700 years. The book documents the family connections of more than 600,000 Jews, making it the largest and most comprehensive resource of its kind.

Dr. Rosenstein

Many thousands of Jewish families are documented in the work, including a number of well-known figures in the Jewish and non-Jewish world, such as members of European royal families and nobility.

The Unbroken Chain is the result of many years of intensive research. Originally published in 1976 as a single volume, it has grown immensely into a 9-volume set with each volume containing an average of 700 pages.

Dr. Rosenstein also founded the Jewish Genealogy Society in 1977, the first of dozens of Jewish genealogy societies that have been founded since.

Dr. Rosenstein was kind enough to answer a few of our questions about his life’s work as a genealogist.

Tell us about your background and how you developed an interest in genealogy.

I was born into a quasi-traditional home in Cape Town, South Africa in October 1944. My mother was born in Cape Town in 1910, her parents having emigrated from Minsk, Russia about 1900. My father, Emanuel Rosenstein, was born in Vilna in April 1909 and immigrated to South Africa in 1926. Throughout the years he kept his original ship passenger ticket (and a postcard of the ship S.S. Glengorm Castle) and his small diary with one single entry: “I arrived in South Africa, on April 15, 1926.”­­

The cover of The Unbroken Chain, third edition, volume I

Our family lacked religion other than Friday night candles and Friday night Kiddush. My father read Hebrew and would work on Shabbat but spent Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services in synagogue. My mother kept a kosher home but went out on Shabbat to have good times with family and friends. She could not read Hebrew.

In the 1950s in Cape Town there were no Jewish schools. I went to a private Irish Catholic School, and attended cheder three times a week after regular school with my brother.

Unlike my brother, I expressed a keen interest in Judaism as at about age 10 I began to ask my father about our family history. He shared with me memories of his home in Bialystok, Poland, his First World War travails, his escape hidden in a wagon used by non-Jews to his maternal grandfather, Mordecai Katzenellenbogen, famed Jewish bookseller and publisher in Vilna (1858–1934) and family hardships after the crash of the German currency.

He gave me original old family documents and photos for safekeeping. I still have them today. He shared what he knew, especially being proud of his family tradition that we are descended from a Jewish King in Poland (actually a Royal official of the Lithuanian Duchy). My father knew very little of this history, which I was able to uncover in great detail over the ensuing years.

Another branch of the Katzenellenbogen family also settled in various towns of South Africa, including Cape Town. When they arrived in the late 1890s they brought with them a handwritten book manuscript recording the detailed ancestry to the 16^th century founder of the family, known MaHaRaM Padua (Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen, Chief Rabbi of Padua, who died in 1565 and is buried with his wife, son and daughter-in-law in the old Padua cemetery).

Moreover, Jan Van Riebeeck the founder of Cape Town, landed at the Cape of Good Hope on 6 April 1652. He was a Dutch navigator and colonial administrator of the Dutch East India Company (DEIC). Between 1666 and 1679 the DEIC built the Castle of Good Hope in Cape Town, the oldest existing colonial building in South Africa. Its five bastions were named after the main titles of William III of Orange-Nassau (William of Orange, also called William Henry, Prince of Orange (born November 14, 1650): Leerdam, Buuren, Katzenellenbogen, Nassau, and Oranje. He was King of England, Scotland and Ireland until his death in 1702.

Once again the longest of all Jewish surnames, Katzenellenbogen, began to flourish in both the Jewish and non-Jewish world — the “royal” rabbinical families as well as the royal families of kings and queens.

It had been my dream to visit this German town near the Rhine River since I was a teenager. That dream of over a half century came true as recently as June 2023!

The entrance to the town of Katzenelnbogen

What inspired you to write The Unbroken Chain?

In 1960, while my parents were admiring the Red Sea corals in one of the glass-bottomed boats in Eilat, Israel, they met an American couple who were, as it turned out, distantly related members of the same (Katzenellenbogen) family. Within a short while my parents were introduced to their various cousins and were shown a book on their ancestry entitled Records of the Katzenellenbogen Family, printed in 1947, a copy of which is still in my possession.

By another coincidence, there was another large Katzenellenbogen family who had immigrated to South Africa bringing with them a small family pedigree book in Hebrew of the utmost clarity. On one page a branch of the family ended with Rabbi Joel Isaac Katzenellenbogen of Seta (Shod or Shot) from 1834, his first rabbinic post after declining other positions (such as in Kelme) but later was rabbi of Zausmer, Semiatycze and Zarasai (Novo Alexandrowsk). For the record, all these towns were located in Poland.

When I was completing my medical internship at Tel HaShomer Hospital, not too far from Bar Ilan University, I was able to do further research on this Rabbi Joel Isaac, born in Linkuva in 1798 where his father was the town Rabbi and Joel died in 1890 and was buried in the no longer extant Jewish cemetery of Ciechanowice (Poland). Joel wrote a manuscript of rabbinic responsa entitled “Zerah Yizchak” published by his son, Abraham Abba Katzenellenbogen of Pinsk, in Vilna in 1898. The list of distinguished rabbis who wrote an approbation to this book included Rabbi Shmuel Mohilever of Bialystok (1824–1898), Rabbi Chaim HaLevi Soloveitchik of Brest Litovsk (commonly referred to as Brisk) (1853–1918), Rabbi Eliyahu Chaim Meisel of Horodok and Lodz (1821–1912), Rabbi Chaim Berlin, Chief Rabbi of Moscow, Volozhin and Kobrin (1832–1912) and Rabbi Eliyahu Baruch Kamai, Dean of the Mir Yeshiva (1840-1917).

Abba’s brother Samuel Michel of Vilna died of the Cholera epidemic there in 1872. Samuel’s son was my great-grandfather, Mordecai Katzenellenbogen. With this information I was able to integrate my branch of the Katzenellenbogen family with certainty.

As a result of my diverse experiences, I became a collector of anything related to the Katzenellenbogen family: books, documents, signatures, manuscripts, etc. I became known as the “Mr. Katzenellenbogen” collector and gathered many interesting items, which could fill a small museum today. One in particular stands out: I was able to obtain, within a few short weeks, two books autographed by my great-great-grandfather, Rabbi Joel Isaac, one book dating back as early as 1834 when he assumed his first rabbinical pulpit in Shod that year.

The purpose of The Unbroken Chain is to preserve for posterity the genealogy of my paternal grandmother and all its collaterals, so that we may be indeed proud of our ancestry. To quote Edmund Burke, “People will not look forward to posterity who never look backwards to their ancestry.”

What was something surprising you uncovered in your research?

When I first published the first 1976 edition of The Unbroken Chain, I discovered that rabbinical families are indeed our “Jewish royalty.” The flyleaf of that 1976 edition stated, “Likened to the royal courts of Europe, known for their predilection toward intermarriage… [there was also] continual intermarriage in the line of descendants of the Rabbi of Padua” (as was the case of the MaHaRaL of Prague [Rabbi Judah Lowe, died in 1609]) and almost all famous rabbinical families. This is a major revelation of which I was totally unaware and prepared for, which is why my book The Unbroken Chain has gone through three editions.

How would you recommend that someone start researching their Jewish family history?

The first step a researcher must take is interviewing various family members to verify that the information received is consistent throughout. Often it is inconsistent and that points to the next step in the process.

The second step involves consulting family documents such as birth, marriage, and death records as well as many other recorded sources — naturalization papers, passports, tombstone inscriptions, education documents, personal family letters, family trees (megillot yochasin), manuscripts, auction items, and newspapers (articles, obituaries and announcements such as births/marriages/deaths).

To illustrate what may emerge, I would like to share a personal family example that shows how much such documents can reveal. My father left Poland in 1926 at age seventeen for Cape Town, South Africa. At about the same time his sister, Raya, moved to Liege, Belgium to study pharmacy and was married to (my uncle) Saul Sazpiro, a grandson of Rabbi Rafael Shapiro of Volozhin. As often happens, old documents expounding on the lives of family members end up being auctioned. Such was the case of a letter written in 1934 by Rabbi Chaim Ozer Grodzinski (1863–1940), Chief Rabbi and Dayan (Judge) of Vilna, mentioning my uncle’s Saul’s plight in Liege and requesting the addressee to provide him with financial support and added that his wife is the granddaughter of the bookseller in Vilna, Mordechai Katzenellenbogen (my great-grandfather). I was unable to buy the item but had to be content with a picture from the auction catalog (2023). However, another letter (see below) gave me more family insights of the family’s situation in the period between the two World Wars.

My father had always claimed he was sent to Cape Town as there was no future for him in post-WWI in Poland. My father’s sister, mentioned above, when I met her told me my father was sent away because he was “difficult to handle.”

And so it remained until, in 2022, I rediscovered an almost indecipherable letter dated 1930 written in cursive Yiddish, in my father’s old collection of documents. The letter was written by my father’s grandmother, Devora Katzenellenbogen, in which she writes how much she misses her grandson Emanuel (my father) and that “Raya has taken my last bit of health from me. I have no rest during the day and cannot sleep all night because we should never have allowed her to leave under these conditions and things are turning out bad in spite of our best intentions.”

“Dear Emanuel, if you were to lay on my heart a thousand pounds it would not be as heavy as it is about her. It gnaws on my heart terribly; it tears me apart because I see our misfortune. She is not at all the same Raya. We don’t know her. Tears are streaming from my eyes. Only you are our “naches” (pride and joy). You are so far away and God knows if you are well. You must always be wary when there is good news.”

Other helpful resources include websites: JRI Poland, JewishGen, ship passenger manifests, and other relevant databases, Yad Vashem Pages of Testimony, Holocaust survivor documents, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and its collections, Steven Spielberg’s survivor interviews, etc. and of course MyHeritage

The third step, which takes serious sleuthing and requires poring over difficult-to-decipher records, is the use of published sources, which include the histories of pre-Holocaust communities (many in Yiddish as well as Hebrew and English) and often includes family trees and biographies of famous families, their rabbis, community leaders, prominent community notables, etc. Yizkor books of numerous villages, towns and cities of European (and elsewhere) countries are invaluable for research.

Visit Dr. Rosenstein’s website at www.neilrosenstein.com for more information and to order all printed volumes of The Unbroken Chain, which are also available on Amazon. You can also follow him on Facebook or visit his publisher’s website at www.avotaynu.com.

Burg Katz castle on the Rhine

A castle in the town of Katzenelbogen