Berdichev Bankers and the Tzemach Tzedek

The story begins, as these stories so often do, with a chance comment one of the readers here made.

You can see it here on THIS post, about ‘Mr Israel’, the WWF wrestling nephew of the Chazon Ish who was also a member of the (masonic….) ‘Muslim Brotherhood’.

(Again, who can make this stuff up?!)

It was something about how every Halperin / Heilprin they ever met is somehow associated with Chabad.

Hmm.

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The ‘HALPERIN / HEILPRINS’ are right in the middle of this whole dodgy saga.

Some of them – the ones somehow connected to the false messiah ‘Jacob Frank’ – made a big effort to change their name away from HEILPRIN to….PULVEMACHER.

I guess they figured no-one would ever accuse them of changing their name to something so unwieldy. Or something.

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Anyway, I’m tootling around the family trees, and also reading over some of the pages of the LURIE LEGACY, sent to me by a very kind reader, and trying to ‘zero in’ on the HALPERIN / HEILPRIN’s a little more, when I trip over this, on the berdichev.org site:

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It’s a letter from a wealthy HALPERIN banker in Berdichev, to Rothschilds Freres in Paris, from 1842, that appears to have been auctioned off on eBay in the last few years.

I am including the full description below, but please do go and click on THIS link, to see the handwritten original:

DESCRIPTION:

HALPERIN & SONS. Manuscript Letter Signed. 1 page + integral stampless address leaf. Berdytshceff [Berdichev, Tsarist Russia], with Brody and other postmarks, October 22/4, 1842. 9 x 10.5 inches. Horizontal and vertical folds; triangular cut and marginal tear on address leaf, not affecting text; some pencil and ink computations in margin; Good condition overall.

French text. To Rothschild Freres, Paris. A business letter, apparently about large money transfers, mentioning Hammer & Schmidt of Leipzig; Stieglitz & Co., St. Petersburg (sometimes called the “Rothschilds of Russia”, though they were German Jewish converts to Christianity); Jacob Schafnagl; Gagliardo Lazzaro; and Arnstein & Eskeles of Vienna (prominent Austrian-Jewish financiers, patrons of Mozart, whose descendants also converted to Christianity).

The historical sources I’ve consulted have sketchy, and sometimes conflicting, information about the Halperins of Berdichev, even including such spelling variations of the surname as Galperin and Heilprin. The following information is not intended to be historically definitive, merely a guidepost for those with expertise which I lack:

The Halperins were not only the first prominent Jewish financiers of the Russian Ukraine in the early 19th century, but also the most influential lay supporters of Lubavitch Hassidic Judaism.

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This is where I really start to sit up – because I’ve literally been ALL OVER the story about Chabad chassidut for about five years now, and this is the very first time I heard about these ‘HALPERINS’ who were ‘the most influential lay supporters of Lubavitch Hassidic Judaism.’

Before we continue, let’s ‘locate’ these CHABAD HALPERINS on that same family tree that includes:

  • the Chazon Ish,
  • ‘Mr Israel’,
  • R Chaim Kanievsky, z’tl,
  • Shimon Peres,
  • Yitzhak Rabin,
  • the Reichmann billionaires of Canada – and probably, a few hundred more interesting people we still haven’t managed to connect up with.

Yet.

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If you go to the (totally messed-up) tree for R YECHIEL HALPERIN [HEILPRIN], the SEDER HADOROTH, (1660-1746), that where you can start to trace a little more of what is going on here.

The SEDER HADOROTH’s tree has numerous very interesting link ups with a whole bunch of people we’ve been talking about here on the blog.

The difficulty is this: I know his tree has been totally messed-around, to try to hide the real truth, so it’s unreliable. At the same time, I also know that because of all the ‘DNA testing’, they still have to find a way of ‘connecting’ in descendants whose DNA show they belong in this tree – without giving the game away too much.

My hat goes off to Kevin Lawrence Hanit, and all the other Geni gatekeepers, who truly have done an outstanding job of keeping the truth hidden in plain sight whilst bamboozling us all with fake personas and mis-matched generations.

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So, let’s start with the HALPERIN BANKERS of BERDICHEV.

Like this:

SEDER HADOROTH > YESHAYE HALPERIN AB’D VITKEV > MOISHE HALPERIN ABD BERDICHEV (aka R MOSHE SLOTVINER) m MINDEL CHAYOT > (1) YOSEF CHARIF HALPERIN AB’D BERDICHEV > (2) ISRAEL ZALMANOV HALPERIN (aka BANKER YISROEL M’BERDICHEV’ > (3) R YAAKOV YOSEF HALPERIN OF BERDICHEV – the CHABAD lay supporter and financier mentioned in this letter.

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Before we move on, MINDEL CHAYOT is the great-granddaughter of the SHACH / SHABTAI TZVI.

Of course.

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Ok, let’s continue with the letter, because now we are going to pick up some more really useful clues, to start to stitch together a bit more of our ‘real Jewish history’:

The founder of the family fortune was YOSEF HALPERIN, who is mentioned in folktales about the famed Hassidic Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev.

This is Number 1, in the descent from the SEDER HADOROTH.

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He was succeeded by a son, who, according to different accounts, was named ISRAEL YAKOVLEVICH or YAAKOV YOSEF. (Perhaps there were two brothers, or one of these was a grandson?) This letter seems to be signed with the initial “J”, but it could also be a capital “I”, and the Rothschild docketing note on the address leaf is also unclear.

‘Israel Zelmanov Halperin’ is number 2, in the descent above, while Yaakov Yosef Halperin is number 3, and is meant to be Israel’s son, not his brother.

But Geni gatekeepers lie about a lot….. So probably the letter is correct, and they were siblings, not father and son.

Let’s continue.

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In any case, when this letter was written, Halperin of Berdichev was a wealthy financier who, unlike other Jewish bankers of the time, had remained true to his faith and was the influential leader of the Jewish community in the western Ukraine….

– So influential that when, in 1843, the Tsarist Russian Government sponsored a small conference of distinguished Jews in St. Petersburg to resolve the bitter dispute over the fate of Jewish education between the Lubavitch Hassidim and adherents of the “Jewish Enlightenment”, Halperin was one of the five distinguished Jews present – and the only one who supported the views of Hassidic Rabbi MENAHEM MENDL SHNEERSON.

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We just learned more in this one paragraph about what was really happening 200 years ago in the Jewish community in Russia than from all the so-called ‘history’ books that have falsified so much of this story.

And again – I have NEVER heard of ‘HALPERIN of BERDICHEV’ being talked about in connection with fighting the ‘enlightment’ in Russia – and I have been all over this story for years.

We hear a ton about the GUNZBURGS (strangely, not mentioned at all here…) and about YEHOSHUA ZEITLIN (strangely, also missing from this discussion….) and ‘NATA NATAN NOTKIN’ son-in-law of the SHA’AGAT ARYEH, guy who got the ALTER REBBE of CHABAD apparently freed the second time he was arrested and business partner of ABRAHAM PERETZ….

None of those people, nor their descendents, are mentioned in connection with the wealthy Jewish bankers of Russia and St Petersburg.

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The whole trick with this stuff is trying to figure out ‘who are the real people’ and ‘who were the fake personas, invented to help forge a different version of Jewish history’.

A rough rule of thumb is that anyone mentioned in a Chabad ‘tale’ or story is usually a persona. (But there are some exceptions – as we’ll see below.)

Let’s continue with the letter:

Shneerson wished to win Russian Government approval to maintain traditional, private Jewish schools and Yeshivot, while the reformers favored state-sponsored Jewish schools where primary study of Talmud would be supplanted by reading more modern texts.

That “reform” was probably favored by the Government, and the fact that the outcome of the conference was something of a compromise between the diametrically opposing positions may have owed a great deal to the political and economic clout of Halperin.

As this letter testifies, he had wide financial contacts throughout Europe which counter-balanced the claim of the reformers to a more “worldly” outlook than tradition-bound Hassidim.

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Of course, the Frankist-Freemasons weren’t about to let him continue to ruin their plans to totally subvert the Jewish youth from within, and uproot the Torah.

The letter continues:

Halperin’s stand cost him dearly. His anti-Hassidic opponents, having first attempted unsuccessfully to prevent his attendance at the conference by quietly discrediting him in the eyes of the authorities, went on to explicit denunciation which led to his financial ruin.

He was ultimately locked away in a debtor’s prison and his firm was dissolved.

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These people play hard-ball to get their opponents out the way.

They still do.

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OK, so before the wealthy CHABAD HALPERIN’s got taken out of action, his kids married into a lot of the families that became ‘chassidic royalty’.

For example, his son DAVID HEILPRIN of VASLUI married LEAH FRIEDMAN – the daughter of ISRAEL OF RUZHIN, aka MOSHE ZVI WERTHEIMER of SAVRAN – the leading Rebbe of his day, who literally hired hit men to try and kill R NATAN of BRESLOV in his bed.

(The reason it failed is because the killer got the wrong guy called ‘Natan’, who was found murdered in his home…..)

And in turn, ‘R ISRAEL OF FRIEDMAN OF RUZHIN’ was married to SARA EFRATI – whose father was one MOSHE HALEVI EFRATI, the ‘rosh yeshiva’ of BERDICHEV.

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Because these people just kept on marrying each other over and over again, I am willing to bet good money that the ‘MOISHE HALPERIN ABD BERDICHEV’ who married MINDEL CHAYOT in the CHABAD HALPERIN family tree is exactly the same guy as this ‘MOSHE HALEVI EFRATI’, ‘rosh yeshiva’ of BERDICHEV.

That family then also spun-out into ‘enlightened Frankist-Freemason-ness’, and at least one branch of it became known as the EFRUSSI bankers of Berdichev – who were off marrying Rothschilds, non-Jewish aristos – and the direct descendents of ‘Jacob Frank’.

(More about them another time, maybe. But Clifford Shack is convinced that Maurice EPHRUSSI fathered STALIN….)

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There is so much to tell you, about who else is in this family tree.

Like, that exact same SONIA SARA RATNER (DISKIN) – married to ELIYAHU ZALMAN HALPERIN some time before she married YEHOSHUA LEIB DISKIN, and who had the famous Z-ist commie either as a son or stepson, called MICHAEL HALPERIN (1860-1919)

But I’m still unpicking a bunch of very interesting stuff about who these people really were, in the real world. So in the meantime, let’s just take a closer look at some of the other Russian bankers mentioned in this letter, above.

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Here’s that paragraph again:

Hammer & Schmidt of Leipzig;

Stieglitz & Co., St. Petersburg (sometimes called the “Rothschilds of Russia”, though they were German Jewish converts to Christianity);

Jacob Schafnagl;

Gagliardo Lazzaro; and

Arnstein & Eskeles of Vienna (prominent Austrian-Jewish financiers, patrons of Mozart, whose descendants also converted to Christianity).

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ARNSTEIN AND ESKELES link us directly into the heart of the Frankist-Freemason project – and also directly to ‘JACOB FRANK’ (Eskeles….) himself.

But I have to say, I’ve never heard of the other four names here before.

Apart from ARNSTEIN and ESKELES, the only other name that turns up anything in the Jewish community is ‘STIEGLITZ.

I found a bunch of ‘Baron Steiglitzs’ who converted from Judaism to xtianity and then set up the Russian National Bank over HERE.

Snippet:

ALEXANDER STIEGLITZ was born in Saint Petersburg to banker Baron Ludwig von Stieglitz who was a founder of the banking-house “Stieglitz and Co”.

After the death of his father, Stieglitz inherited the banking-house and succeeded as a banker of the Emperor.

In 1840–1850 he successfully sold six 4% government loans to finance the construction of the Moscow – Saint Petersburg Railway and secured a significant foreign loan at the height of the Crimean War….

On 31 May 1860 Emperor Alexander II established the State Bank of the Russian Empire and Stieglitz became its first governor.

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You will be shocked – SHOCKED!!! – to hear that these STIEGLITZ xtian-Frankist-Freemason-bankers in Russia descend from that same bunch of SCHIFFs and GANS’ that we always seem to come back to here, on the blog.

Or to put it another way, half a century before JACOB SCHIFF is off helping to embed the Central Bank, or ‘FED’ in the US, his close family member Baron Alexander von Stieglitz was doing exactly the same sort of thing back in Mother Russia.

(And you can also spell ‘GANS’ – who first gave us the ‘star of David’ – as GANTZ….)

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I also found a R ZECHARIAH MENDEL STEIGLITZ who kind of appears out of nowhere, who marries EIDEL HOROWITZ, first cousin of the CHOZEH OF LUBLIN, around the time these other STEIGLITZs started converting out and become big Russian financiers.

That could be something, it could be nothing.

(The Chozeh of Lublin is another huge mess, genealogically. BH, we will figure out more of what that is one day.)

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But for now- I have left the best until last.

Let me draw your attention back to this paragraph, above:

[I]n 1843, the Tsarist Russian Government sponsored a small conference of distinguished Jews in St. Petersburg to resolve the bitter dispute over the fate of Jewish education between the Lubavitch Hassidim and adherents of the “Jewish Enlightenment”,

Halperin was one of the five distinguished Jews present – and the only one who supported the views of Hassidic Rabbi MENAHEM MENDL SHNEERSON.

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Pay close attention here:

There are five ‘distinguished Jews’ attending that conference in 1843 – HALPERIN, and four other Jews who favor the Russian government’s reforms and are ‘enlightened’, so-called.

So of course, I spent a bit of time trying to find who these other four ‘enlightened’ reforming ‘distinguished Jews’ actually were.

The answer was very enlightening.

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If you go to the Chabad main website HERE, you’ll find an article called:

The 1843 Battle Over Jewish Education

Strangely, for an historical piece from Chabad, it’s actually full of real names and people who can be independently verified to show they actually did exist in the ‘real world’.

That article lists who the four ‘enlightened’ reformers were, or maskilim, who were arguing against ISRAEL HALPERIN, the Berdichev banker and disciple of the TZEMACH TZEDEK.

Snippet:

The commission took place over the summer months from May until August of 1843.

Those in attendance included:

the Tzemach Tzedek,

Rabbi Itzeleh of Volozhin, 

Israel Halperin (a businessman with traditionalist leanings) and 

Bezalel Stern, a maskil who was empathetic to the traditionalist perspective.

In addition, the maskil Aryeh Leib Mandelstam served as the official translator, and [Max] Lilienthal and various officials were also present.

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What?!?!

What is ‘Rabbi Itzeleh of Volozhin’ doing in this list of ‘enlightened reformers’?!

Remember, he’s the son of that same, mysterious, ‘CHAIM OF VOLOZHIN’, leading student of the GRA – and also the ancestor of SHIMON PERES and YITZHAK RABIN (amongst many, many other people you’ve probably heard of, who are still pulling the strings here in the Holy Land.)

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I want to quote another couple of pertinent snippets from that piece on the CHABAD site, as it directly ties-in to some other people I am currently researching.

Shortly after [the Tzemach Tzedek’s] return [to Lubavich], he was visited by a delegation of Lithuanian rabbis—Rabbi David Luria of Bichov, Rabbi Shlomo Lifschitz of Minsk, and Rabbi Yehezkel Beininson of Slutsk.

They discussed the Petersburg conference and potential countermeasures to the Haskalah movement. 

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We met ‘R SHLOMO LIFSCHITZ OF MINSK’ (the CHEMDAT SHLOMO) previously, when we were trying to track down who Sonia Ratner and YEHOSHUA LEIB DISKIN really were.

Read more about the CHEMDAT SHLOMO in Hebrew HERE – we will be coming back to him, BH.

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The other two are still being researched – but the RADAL links us to some very interesting stuff, even by my standards of interesting.

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Here’s a last snippet from that Chabad post:

A year or so after these events, in the summer of 1845, Lilienthal mysteriously left Russia, abruptly abandoning his grand plans for reform.….

Shortly after leaving Russia, Lilienthal made his way to the shores of America, where he became one of the founding leaders of the Reform movement.

(If you are bored, go and research how many of these ‘proto-reform rabbis’ in the USA, particularly, were also 32nd and 33rd degree masons. The answer is most enlightening.)

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But, to keep this straight: Reb Itzele of Volozhin was on the same side as Max Lilienthal, one of the ‘founding leaders of the Reform movement’.

The Volozhin Yeshiva was not, at all, what we have all been brainwashed into believing.

And dafka, it’s the Volozhin Yeshiva that has so many murky connections to all these secret societies in the so-called frum world – and particularly where that intersects with Eretz Yisrael.

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R’ REFAEL SHAPIRO, the Rosh Yeshiva of VOLOZHIN (1837-1921) also shows up in the SEDER HADOROT’s family tree, BTW.

Along with people that connect us straight to the RADAL and the so-called ‘LURIE LEGACY’ – and the RIVLIN family.

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Let’s end this monster piece by taking a brief closer look at ‘R ITZELE OF VOLOZHIN’s’ descendants – whoever that guy really actually was, in real life.

This description of him comes from the eilatgordinlevitan site:

Reb Itsele knew languages.

Like his father he spoke Russian and Polish fluently.

He was Interested in medicine, he was able to read and to understand Latin. He would even check his students and tell them which medications to take.

However he did not inflate his expertise. In the case of a serious eyes illness of his favorite student the writer Kalman Shulman, he sent him to Vilna to the renowned Professor Poritshinski with an introduction letter, where the patient eventually recovered.

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He sounds like a total maskil – remember that at this time, even Max Lillienthal, the notorious maskil referred to above was still wearing tzitit in public, albeit very small ones.

These snippets are from the Valozhyn Jewish Gen page HERE:

Rabbi Itzele of Volozhin had two sons-in-law: Rabbi Eliezer Yitzchak Fried and Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin (the Netzi’v)

The Berlins intersect with the Zeitlins and the Frumkins – and the Shachors.

In fact, it looks like the Shachors / SHORS (does that name ring a bell? And it can also be spelled S-H-A-W….) changed their name to ZEITLIN.

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Last thing for now comes from the WIKI page on the NETZIV, HERE:

Berlin did initially accept some secular studies rather than shut down the [Volozhin] Yeshiva completely.

However, the requirements became more and more onerous with the government eventually stipulating that: “All teachers of all subjects must have college diplomas … no Judaic subjects may be taught between 9 AM and 3 PM … no night classes are allowed … total hours of study per day may not exceed ten.”

Faced with these restrictions, Berlin chose to close the Yeshiva [in 1892].

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In other words… The NETZIV was also a maskil, just a more moderate one.

And Volozhin Yeshiva was not the bastion of yiddishkeit we all got brainwashed into believing it was.

Which explains a heck of a lot…

I have a lot more research to do now.

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PS: No-one talks about what happened to ISRAEL HALPERIN, aside from that description on the letter, that says he apparently ended his days in a debtor’s prison.

He’s not mentioned anywhere else, not even on the Chabad site – which is kind of weird, as he is described as the leading lay supporter of the TZEMACH TZEDEK.

Let’s add it to the pile of ‘things that need to be clarified more, one of these days’.

But in the meantime…. The birur continues.

3 replies
  1. Yossi
    Yossi says:

    very interesting!
    the names especially. The Halperins I know, at least the men, all have names reflected in this research.

    Reply
  2. Simon
    Simon says:

    Very, very interesting.

    Unrelated: when I give a ‘ransom of the soul’ to RavBerland.com, it goes to a New York non-profit called Strength of Israel, Inc. What does this organization have to do with Eliezer Berland?

    Reply
    • Rivka Levy
      Rivka Levy says:

      It’s a NY registered charity run by one of the Rav’s main gabbais, who I know personally.

      It was set up in NY as most of the English speakers who donate via the site are in the US, and want a tax receipt for a charity in the US.

      Reply

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