As usual in these stories of mystery and intrigue, when you start to follow the money is when you really start to figure out a few things.
So today, let’s continue following the steady flow of money coming into Eretz Yisrael over the last 250 years, primarily raised from simple Jews like you and me – who had dreams of geula in their hearts, and words of prayers on their lips.
But collected and spent by our ‘dear leaders’ – many of whom appear to have become corrupted in that process, if not some time before it.
This tranche of the real history of Eretz Yisrael is going to begin – where else? – back in Vilna.
Let us begin.
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Back in THIS post, we learned that the Ashkenazi immigrants to the ‘Old Yishuv’ in Eretz Yisrael – including the Vilna Gaon’s band of ‘PERUSHIM’ – were almost exclusively being bankrolled by a German banker living in Amsterdam who was directly connected to the leading Frankist families of Prague.
His name was Tzvi Hirsch Lehren.
It seems that Lehren’s organisation in Amsterdam, and not actually the mechanism on the ground in places like Vilna, were responsible for both registering the ‘new immigrants’ to Eretz Yisrael before they sailed, and also distributing how much haluka payment they should be recieving once in Israel.
And that haluka payment came along with a whole bunch of strings, that are usually blamed on the recalcritant ‘rabbis of the Old Yishuv’ – but that actually seem to have originated in the unrealistic ‘messianic yearnings’ of the (maybe?) reformed Frankist, Tzvi Hirsch Lehren.
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While all this was going on, the Sephardi yishuv in Eretz Israel – also predominantly Sabbatean believers in the ‘second coming’ of Shabtai Tzvi, although probably not the Frankist antinomians of the Ashkenazy world – were getting funded seperately, via the Jewish community of Istanbul.
We will take a closer look at them another time, maybe.
Because today, let’s return back to Vilna, to an organisation that was called the RAZNEI VILNA.
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This snippet comes from the Hebrew Wiki page HERE:
The Raznei Vilnius was an organization of the Lithuanian , Russian and Polish communities to raise funds for joint Jewish enterprises, primarily to support the Jews of the Land of Israel through haluka funds.
The organization existed throughout the 19th century and was for most of its time a clandestine organization in order to hide its activities from the eyes of the Tsar’s regime, which suspected that the Jewish organization was part of a global plot.
In addition, the Jews acted in violation of an explicit law that prohibited the transfer of funds from Russia to enemy states (and the Ottoman Empire, of which the Land of Israel was a part, was an enemy land).
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What we can already start to understand from this brief snippet, is that without espionage and high-level political shinanigans – no money from Lithuania, Russia and Poland apparently could have got through to the Ashkenazim in Eretz Yisrael.
What we also understand from this is that transferring money to Eretz Yisrael at this time, from these places, was illegal.
And lastly, this sentence also really jumped out at me:
[F]or most of its time a clandestine organization in order to hide its activities from the eyes of the Tsar’s regime, which suspected that the Jewish organization was part of a global plot.
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Remember, the RAZNEI VILNIUS was operating a 100 years before the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion….
So either the Tzar was paranoid (and had ruach hakodesh….) Or he knew a lot more about some of the things we are still trying to figure out, in our days.
Let’s start to unpick all this, and see where we get to.
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The next few lines on Wikipedia is where we are going to be spending most of our time today.
Here’s a google translate of what it says:
The organization was founded in the 18th century, when its institutions and organizational structure closed in 1798.
It was headed by governors who were Gabbays of their communities, merchants and high-net-worth Jewish bankers, and alongside them was a spiritual leadership of Torah greats, all of whom acted voluntarily.
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Let’s pause to explain that most, if not all ‘high-net-worth Jewish bankers’ in this time period were court Jews.
And nearly all those court Jews just married each other down the generations, and come from the interesting families I keep circling around here, directly descended from SHABTAI TZVI aka THE SHACH – and also, leading xtianised ‘marranos’ who ‘returned to the fold’.
At least, they returned for a generation or two, before more often than not ‘assimilating’ again.
Let’s continue with the VILNIUS RAZNEI description now, where we’re going to learn something very important:
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All of the governors who headed the [‘RAZNEI VILNIUS] organization were affiliated with the GRA family (the Vilna Gaon).
The organization was headed by members of families, all of whom were descended from the GRA’s grandfather’s family, the family of Moshe Rivkahs, the author of the”Be’er HaGolah. “
[And / or, who married into the family.]
In the 19th century, the first three heads of the organization served together for forty years.
These were R. Aryeh Leib Pesseles, R. Meshulam Zalman B. Yaakov Uri (R. Zalman Uri’s), and R. Shmuel Harik (R. I. Yehuda KLatzky).
They were called the Three Pillars of Vilnius.
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If you’re wondering how this information goes together with the story we all got told about the Vilna Gaon being some super-humble genius who ‘shied away’ from anything to do with politics or the ‘real world’…. Join the club.
Increasingly, that’s looking like deliberate misdirection.
Also, information about those three heads of this clandestine money smuggling organisation who were called ‘THE THREE PILLARS OF VILNIUS – i.e. the Vilna Kahal is surprisingly sparse.
Remember, all this was happening when the ‘Vilna Kahal’ was said to be waging all-out war against ‘SHMUEL the last ABD of VILNA’, who we wrote about HERE.
This guy:
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It seems now, increasingly, that they ‘hid’ that massive all-out war between the different ‘Jewish charity mafias’ running Vilna undercover of some hogwash story about ‘chassidim’ and ‘mitnagdim’ being at each others’ throats.
So let’s see what else we can dig out about what was really going on in Vilna, around this time, with these ‘THREE PILLARS’.
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First, let’s take a closer look at MOSHE RIVKASH, author of the ‘Be’er Ha’Golah’, which translates as the ‘well of exile’.
He lived in Vilna, and was a close associate – and also some sort of relative by marriage of the SHACH.
In 1648 when the Chielminiki pogroms fell like a thunderclap across the region, ‘Moshe Rivkas’ apparently managed to escape to Amsterdam, where he stayed for 10 years and finished written his commentary on the Shulchan Aruch called ‘Be’er HaGolah’.
As usual with these histories, there are so many holes and contradictions in the story.
This snippet comes from Chabad:
In the introduction to his book, Rabbi Moshe Rivkash describes the terrors of that experience.
“I fled from Wilno with nothing but my walking staff in my right band, and my Tefillin bag in my left,” he writes, lamenting the loss of his house full of everything good, and, above all, his treasured library, which he had inherited from his father, and which he had enlarged by his own new acquisitions….
Finally Rabbi Moshe and part of his family, with some other refugees, managed to get on a boat sailing for Amsterdam.
Here they were met with great compassion by their Sephardic Jewish brethren, who clothed them and fed them. Other ship-loads of refugees which continued to arrive in Amsterdam were similarly cared for…. The good people of the Amsterdam Jewish community therefore secured transportation for many refugees to go on to Frankfort…
Rabbi Moshe, however, was kept in Amsterdam, where the leading Rabbis, Rabbi Shaul Halevi Murtira and Rabbi Yitzchak Abuhav, and some prominent lay members of this community, considered it a privilege to support Rabbi Moshe Rivkash and his family.
With their financial support, Rabbi Moshe undertook the task of preparing a new publication of the Shulchan Aruch, together with his commentaries.
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Nothing is mentioned of how the destitute refugee MOSHE RIVKASH managed to make so much money while in Amsterdam writing his seforim that by the time he returned to Vilna, where he died in 1672, he was an extremely wealthy man.
Before we take a look at the THREE PILLARS, let’s just take a look at R Shaul HaLevi Morteira and R Yitzhak Abuhav.
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R Shaul HaLevi Morteira (1596-1660), The Givat Shaul, was another ‘returned’ descendent of Portuguese Marranos, who returned to open Jewish observance in Amsterdam – and became the rabbi of the famous heretic Baruch Spinoza.
Morteira was one of the people who excommunicated Spinoza, and he also wrote many books ‘defending Judaism’ against xtianity. You can read more about him HERE.
He died before ‘Shabtai Tzvi Messianism’ swept all before it in Amsterdam, and most other places in the Jewish world, five short years later.
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Morteira’s daughter Sarah married JOSIAH PARDO – the first official rabbi of the ‘New World’ after the known Sabbatean (and fellow Amsterdam rabbi) Isaac ABOAB FONSECA became a rabbi in Brazil.
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So, I started looking for who this ‘R Yitzhak Abuhav’ was, who was also apparently supporting Moshe Rikvas, the gggrandad of the GRA, in Amsterdam.
I was turning up bubkiss about him, until I hit this video, below, and realised that ‘Yitzhak Abuhav’ is actually one and the same as the Sabbatean rabbi I just mentioned, YITZHAK ABOAV DE FONSECA.
Sigh.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kErRnXH1EjM
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He’s a very interesting guy.
You can read a lot more about him HERE, but these are the bits that caught my eye:
He’s from a very prominent family of ‘forced converts’ from Portugal, who move to Amsterdam when Yitzhak is 7, and ‘re-judaize’.
He’s also one of the three who excommunicates Baruch Spinoza.
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His close study partner is MENASSAH BEN ISRAEL – a very key figure in all this who really deserves his own post.
Menassah ben Israel arranged with Oliver Cromwell to let the Jews back into the UK, and was also hanging out with people like Rembrandt – who even sketched him (or some say, sketched his son Shmuel.)
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Back to ABOAB / ABUHAV, who was also the first rabbi outside of Brazel ‘in the NEW WORLD’ – if you believe official history about no-one setting foot there for a billion years, until Colombus tripped over it.
Here’s a snippet, then we’ll catch a couple more lies, then we’ll move on:
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In 1642, Aboab da Fonseca was appointed rabbi at Kahal Zur Israel Synagogue in Recife, in the then Dutch colony of Pernambuco, Brazil, a city which was occupied by the Dutch in 1624…
Aboab da Fonseca was…probably one of the first appointed rabbis of the Americas, along with his rabbinic companion Moses Raphael de Aguilar…
[T]he Portuguese re-occupied the capital of Recife in 1654, after a struggle of nine years.
Fonseca then managed to return to Amsterdam after the loss of the new colony to the Portuguese. Some members of his community immigrated to North America and were among the founders of New Amsterdam.
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So according to this, ‘Yitzhak Aboav’ can’t have been supporting MOSHE RIVKAS in Amsterdam from 1648 onwards, because he himself wasn’t living there until 1654…
One more snippet:
Because of his mystical kabbalistic leanings, less than ten years later, [YITZHAK ABOAB / ABUHAV] was one of the most ardent supporters of the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi in Amsterdam in 1665-1666 (up until the apostasy of the messiah in September 1666).
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As usually happens to me, I just tripped over yet another huge mount of info around the ‘de Aguilar’ family of Sabbateans, mentioned above.
The first ‘Jewish’ Baron ennobled in Austro-Hungary was also meant to be a ‘DE AGUILAR’ – and he could be an alter ego for BERNHARD ESKELES, who was doing exactly the same things at exactly the same time.
Well, let’s park that at return to MOSHE RIVKAS, the GRA’s g-grandad (or something like that).
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If you go HERE, you’ll get to the Wayback machine’s saved copy of the RIVLIN family website – because of course, how could I write about Sabbateans in the Holy Land, and not mention the RIVLINs at least once?!
Here’s a snippet of what it says about the ancestors of MOSHE RIVKAS:
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So, long story short, the Vilna Gaon also descended from Portuguese Marranos, who were located in Prague.
Like this:
YOSEF KHAVER (Prague, died 1559) > PETAKYA > NAFTALI HIRSH SOFER > MOSHE SOFER (RIVKASH – BE’ER HA GOLAH) > PETAKYA (RIVKASH) SOFER > RACHEL SOFER m ELIYAHU CHASSID >
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Strangely, that RIVLIN website then goes on a whole big waffle about BINYAMIN RIVLIN, and HILLEL RIVLIN and MOSHE MAGGID RIVLIN – but curiously omit to detail exactly how everyone is actually related to each other – and also the Vilna Gaon.
But what we can notice here, is that the SOFER family is returning to the picture, together with more Marrano-Sabbatean connections – and yet more connections between Prague and Amsterdam.
(Go back and read this post, from last year: THE CHATAM SOFER’S SPANISH CONNECTIONS).
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Let’s get back to the THREE PILLARS OF VILNA.
while I can’t find information about the ‘Pillar of Vilna’ called Aryeh Leib PESSELES, there is a bunch of info about JOSEPH ELIAS PESSELES, who is another g-grandson of that same MOSHE SOFER RIVKASH, above.
This snippet is from the Jewish Encyclopaedia HERE:
One of the foremost representative Jews of Wilna during the middle and latter part of the eighteenth century.
His father, well known as Rabbi Elias Pesseles, was the grandson of Moses ben Naphtali Ribkas (author of “Be’er ha-Golah”), and also a relative and stanch and lifelong patron of the Gaon of Wilna.
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That same site also tells us that JOSEPH PESSELES was a big supporter of the BERLIN HASKALAH:
A noteworthy feature in all that is known of the career of Joseph Pesseles, and one of interest to the student, is his correspondence, dated 1773, with David Friedländer about Solomon Dubno during the stay of the last-named at Pesseles’ house in Wilna….
The most prominent feature in the correspondence, however, is Pesseles’ remarkable toleration of and apparent intimacy with the forerunners of the Berlin Haskalah as represented by Mendelssohn and his followers.
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If you go to GENI HERE, you start to see the whole family tree for the PESSELES – GRA extended family.
Literally, all the ‘RIVLINS’, the ‘SHICKS’, the ‘RABINOWITZs’ – and so many more of the same name and people that we just keep talking about all the time.
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Once you know that:
- ‘Tzedakah’ in Vilna was big, illicit business
And that:
2. ‘Tzedekah’ in Vilna was kept very closely within the one extended famly of ‘MOSHE RIVKAS’, who made his fortune in Amsterdam, was a close colleague of the SHACH / SHABTAI TZVI, and was also apparently very highly esteemed by the former Marrano-Sabbateans of Amsterdam...
It gets a little easier to at least guess who this otherwise anonymous ARYEH LEIB PESSELES might be related to.
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Here is the GENI post that seems to be our very own Aryeh Leib PESSELES, the nephew of that JOSEPH ELIAS PESSELES, the Haskalah-funding guy, above:
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And here is what we learn about him:
נודע בשם ר’ ליבלע ר’ בערס, היה ראש הפרנסים וגבאי הצדקה
He’s one of the main parnassim of Vilna, and the guy who held the keys to the ‘tzedaka’ going through the Rasnei Vilna illicit charity organisation.
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If you take a look at his relatives, we are deep, deep in the immediate family of the ‘Vilna Gaon’.
His aunt is one BEILA SHOR – who marries one YITZHAK EIZIK LANDAU of Emden.
The LANDAU family is all over this story, but we will get to them another time.
His other aunt is MINDA LIPSHITZ – her husband is NOAH LIPSHITZ – the guy who is buried in the ‘Vilna Gaon”s tomb, and had a shared headstone with ‘the Vilna Gaon’.
Apparently, because the richest family in Vilna couldn’t afford a separate tomb, nor a separate tombstone for a Torah luminary like the GRA….
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Read more about who is really buried in the Vilna Gaon’s tomb HERE.
Screenshot:
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You can find more information about R NOACH MINDES LIPSHITZ on the Kedem website HERE – his daughter SARAH LIPSHITZ is meant to have married the GRA’s son, Avraham.
Meanwhile, on the HAMICHLOL website.... it says that NOACH MENDES married a daughter of the GRA’s uncle, ELIYAHU PESSELES.
Snippet:
About his birth and his youth is unknown today, he married the daughter of Rabbi Eliyahu Pesseles, the GRA’s uncle, who was one of the richest men in Vilnius, and for whom he was named.
So now, take another look at this:
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Someone here is missing….
The GRA’s father, ‘SHLOMO ZALMAN’ is meant to be the brother of DOV BER ELIAS, ELIYAHU PESSELES and JOSEPH PESSELES.
But he’s been totally scrubbed out the tree.
Even on the RIVLIN site HERE, the ‘yichus descent’ curiously stops in the generation just before you get to the GRA himself.
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Pillar number 2 in Vilna is meant to be:
- Meshulam Zalman B. Yaakov Uri (R.Zalman Uri’s
Again, very little to be found online about him…. except for Geni, which comes up trumps, at least in ‘locating’ him in time and space (and the family mafia that is the RIVLIN-GRA extended network.)
HERE is his entry, where he’s referred to as ‘
| R’ Meshullam Zalman Urisohn (Feiges / Pogos), The Tzadik |
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A quick shuftie around his family tree and we see that of course, he’s also deep in the middle of all the action.
His wife is meant to be YUTA DEVORAH HOROWITZ.
She links us back to the YAAKOV YOKEL HOROWITZ of GALUNA who is meant to have ‘blessed’ the Rothschilds with great wealth, like this:
YAAKOV YOKEL HOROWITZ OF GALUNA (1679-1749) > R ISAAC ‘ITZIK HAMBURGER’ HOROWITZ, ABD ALTONA > MORDECHAI ZVI HOROWITZ (1732-1810) m d of MOSHE HERZ HALBERSTADT ABD SATANOV > YUTA DEVORAH HOROWITZ m THE SECOND ‘PILLAR’ OF THE RASNEI VILNA ESPIONAGE AND MONEY SMUGGLING OUTFIT, MESHULAM ZALMAN URISOHN.
And her sister, HESSIA marries JONAH JOSHUA PERETZ OF LUBARTOW – which links us straight to that ‘ABRAHAM PERETZ’ who marries JOSHUA ZEITLIN’S daughter, then goes all xtian and remarries a Russian goy.
It’s a small world.
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Again, I could carry on writing this for a billion years….
For now, let’s end by saying that I could find precisely nothing about the third of the Three Pillars of Vilna, SHMUEL HARIK, the son-in-law of YEHUDA KLATZKI.
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After the GRA’s death, his son R’ AVRAHAM took over as one of the main parnassim of Vilna.
Even today, modern historians will tell you that the chassidim and the perushim in Eretz Yisrael were being funded by exactly the same organisations, in Vilna and Amsterdam (amongst other places.)
And that funding began in 1777…. with the Chassidic Aliyah of Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk and Avraham Kalisker – with the fundraising being left in the hands of one ‘Shneur Zalman of Liadi’….
Contemporary historians have no way of explaining this extraordinary phenomena, of how the biggest ‘mitnagdim’ in the world actually funded the Chassidic Aliya for many decades….
But more and more, I’m coming to the conclusion that the ‘chassidim’ and the ‘perushim’ were actually exactly the same people.
Who were arguing over money, power, real estate – and some very fine kabbalistic ‘details’.
Just one side wore a shtreimel… and the other side didn’t.
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UPDATE:
So, it looks like the LANDAU family also had a branch called ‘SHOR’, who became the ‘ABD of Vilna’.
It seems that the GRA had an aunt called BELLA SHOR, who marries one YITZHAK EIZIK SHOR (LANDAU) (1740-1804), who is also known as ‘ELIAS’.
He descends from both the SHOR (fake family name…) and the GUNZBURGS, and seems to have three wives, including:
CHANNAH LANDAU (d of CHAIM SEGAL LANDAU of VILNA, and ABD of PODKAMIEN)
and
FRUMET LANDAU.
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One of his kids with ‘BELLA’ – the aunt of the GRA – is called FEIGE, and she ends up marrying another ABD of Vilna called ABRAHAM POSWEILER.
‘Abraham Abele Posweiler’ seems to have many different profiles on GENI, mostly curated by known disinformation ‘gatekeepers’….
Alter Rebbe Posweller 
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This is a picture of him.
Is he a chossid or a mitnaged?
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Meanwhile, with another wife Channah Landau, Yitzhak Eizik Shor has a couple of sons, one called:
R’ Khatskel HaLevi Landau (Preger), of Vilna
Who is also meant to be an ABD of Vilna – and who adopts his mother’s maiden name of ‘LANDAU’, while ditching the surname ‘SHOR’.
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Both these ‘ABDs of VILNA’ post-date ‘SHMUEL’, who we are told was meant to be the last ABD of Vilna.
Clearly, he wasn’t.
There is a lot of strange stuff going on with these trees.
And I’m starting to wonder about the famous son of the Vilna Gaon, R’ Avraham – and also about his ‘famous brother’, called Avraham Ragoler – who doesn’t seem to be mentioned at all in the Rivlin family tree.
Are they connected to this ‘Abraham Abele Posweiler, ABD of Vilna’, above?
And if yes, why hide it?
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TBC
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