The number on each flag counts the recorded ancestors who lived or died there — traditional and legendary lines included, which is why the deep Lithuanian and Latvian clusters run high.
Austria +
Vienna
City
16th to late 19th century, Habsburg Empire and Austria-Hungary. An early chapter ended abruptly: a scholarly line lived in Vienna until the expulsion of 1670, when the emperor drove the city's Jews out and this branch went north to Silesia. The later chapters were brighter — Vienna's Jews moved from restricted court-Jew status to full emancipation (equal rights under law) in 1867, after which the city became one of Europe's great Jewish centres. A great-great-grandfather of the family was born here in the year of emancipation itself. The reasons to leave arrived later: from the 1890s Vienna's politics turned openly antisemitic under mayor Karl Lueger, and the Anschluss of 1938 destroyed the community altogether — leaving, for those who could, became a matter of timing.
Belarus +
Vitebsk
City
Late 19th century, Russian Empire's Pale of Settlement. Nearly half the town was Jewish — a shtetl, one of the small towns where eastern European Jewish life was lived, full of Yiddish-speaking tradesmen and scholars, and the birthplace of Marc Chagall, a cousin of the family through a shared surname line. The family left in the wave of emigration that followed the 1881 pogroms — organised anti-Jewish riots — and the 1882 May Laws, which restricted Jewish settlement and livelihoods further still and drove hundreds of thousands from the Pale to Britain and America.
Brest
City
15th to 17th century, Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Brisk, in the records — one of the oldest and most important Lithuanian-Jewish communities. A scholarly line was anchored here from the early 1400s, joined in the 16th century by a celebrated arrival from Italy. The wars of the mid-17th century — the 1648–49 Cossack risings and the Muscovite and Swedish invasions that followed — devastated Lithuanian Jewry and scattered its families across the Commonwealth.
Grodno & the small towns
Region
16th to 18th century, Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Grodno, Slonim, Kuźnica, Traby, Navahrudak, Mogilev, Bobruisk — a web of communities through which half a dozen of the tree's lines pass, the adoptive line among them. Rabbinic postings and marriage matches moved scholarly families constantly between these towns; that mobility, not flight, explains most of the moves — until the 17th-century wars and, later, the Pale's poverty gave harder reasons.
Brazil +
São Paulo
City
Late 16th to 17th century, Portuguese colonial Brazil. The far end of the converso escape route — conversos were Jews forcibly converted to Christianity, many of whom kept their Judaism in secret: a Porto-born merchant ancestor crossed the Atlantic around the turn of the 17th century, part of the so-called New Christian trading world that linked Portugal, Amsterdam and Brazil — places where the Inquisition's reach was thinner, though never absent.
Czechia +
Dolní Kralovice
Village
Early 19th century, Habsburg Empire. A small rural Jewish community in Bohemia; daily life was constrained by Austria's Familiants Law — which capped the number of Jewish families and restricted marriages — until Jewish emancipation in 1849. Two generations of the family were born in this village; when emancipation finally opened the cities to Jews, the line moved on to Vienna, part of a broad 19th-century migration of Bohemian rural Jewry into the imperial capital.
Hlučín
Town
Late 18th century, on one of the most contested borders in central Europe. When a 5×great-grandfather was born here in 1772, the town had been Prussian Silesia for thirty years, having been lost by the Habsburgs in the Silesian Wars. Across the next five generations it would pass between Prussian, Czechoslovak, Nazi German, and Czechoslovak rule. The next generation of the family moved south to Rybnik, where this branch put down roots — the ordinary mobility of Silesian Jewry, where residence rights, trade licences and marriage matches pulled families from one market town to the next.
Prague
City
15th to early 17th century, Kingdom of Bohemia. One of the capitals of Ashkenazi life — and home, across more than a century, to a celebrated dynasty of scholars in this tree, rabbis and communal leaders of the city's golden age. Habsburg expulsion orders in 1541 and 1557 and the pull of the Commonwealth's freedoms sent its sons east, to Kraków, Poznań and beyond — exactly the route this tree records, branch after branch.
Egypt +
Alexandria
City
Roman era. One of the great cities of the ancient Jewish diaspora — the communities living outside the Land of Israel. By tradition a sage of the Mishnah era (the early rabbinic period, around 200 CE) was born here and returned to the Galilee, in the centuries when scholars moved freely between Alexandria's vast Greek-speaking Jewish community and the academies of the Land of Israel. The community itself was shattered in the diaspora revolt of 115–117 CE; for Alexandria's Jews, staying was rarely an option for long.
Goshen
Region
The Bible's Egypt. By the traditional reckoning, around a dozen generations of the tree's longest line lived in Goshen, in the eastern Nile delta — and the leaving is the most famous departure in Jewish history, retold at every Passover table since, this family's included.
France +
Troyes
City
11th to 14th century, county of Champagne. One of the lamps of medieval Jewish learning — and by rabbinic tradition this tree descends directly from the city's most famous school of Torah commentary, through the scholar-village of Ramerupt nearby. Leaving was royal policy: the expulsions of the Jews from France in 1182, 1306 and finally 1394 extinguished French Jewry, and the lines crossed into the Rhineland and beyond.
Vitry & Dampierre
Towns
11th to 13th century, Champagne. Tosafist towns — home to the medieval scholars who built on the great Troyes commentaries. The scholar families of the tree's traditional line moved between Champagne's academies as students followed teachers: the ordinary mobility of a world built around the yeshiva — the traditional academy of Jewish study — rather than the market.
Paris
City
12th to 14th century — and then again, six hundred years later. The medieval Paris line lasted until the era of the expulsions; by tradition one rabbinic ancestor of this branch ended his days in the south, in Marseille, after the northern communities scattered. The city returns to the tree in the modern era from an unexpected direction: a 3×great-grandfather born in Baghdad in 1849 settled in Paris and died there in 1927 — part of the Baghdadi merchant diaspora that spread west along the trade routes, the same currents that carried his relatives to Manchester and London.
Germany +
The Rhineland
Region
10th to 15th century, Holy Roman Empire. Mainz, Worms, Speyer and Cologne were the cradle of Ashkenazi Jewry, and the tree's traditional lines run straight through them — including a scholar dynasty brought from Italy to Mainz in the 10th century, the seeding event of Rhineland Jewish life, with later branches in Nuremberg, Heidelberg, Frankfurt, Franconia and Leipzig. The reasons to leave were written in fire: the Crusader massacres of 1096 and the plague-era pogroms of 1348–49 drove the survivors east into Poland and Lithuania — the road almost every Ashkenazi family once walked.
Bavaria
Region
Late 17th to early 18th century, Holy Roman Empire. Jewish life in Bavaria during this period was largely rural and tightly constrained by court-protection arrangements, with communities centred on small towns rather than the larger cities. A 7×great-grandfather — a rabbi — was born here in 1700; the line then moved east into Habsburg Silesia, part of a broader 18th-century migration of Bavarian Jews toward the more established and legally secure Silesian communities, settling at Zülz where the family put down roots for the next several generations.
Breslau
City
Early 20th century, German Empire, Weimar Republic, then Nazi Germany. Breslau had one of Germany's largest Jewish communities and a famed rabbinical seminary — a world destroyed in the Shoah, the Holocaust. A grandmother of the family was born here in 1938; her father was arrested on Kristallnacht and held at Buchenwald, until her mother walked into Gestapo headquarters and bluffed him out. The family fled in February 1939.
Opole
City
Mid-to-late 19th century, Kingdom of Prussia and then the German Empire. Jews had been emancipated in Prussia in 1812; the Upper Silesian community was middle-class, German-speaking, and well integrated — so well integrated that few saw reason to leave until after 1933, when the Nazi state made the reasons unmistakable and the exits closed one by one. A great-great-grandmother of the family was born here in 1880; she did not get out, and was shot at the Ninth Fort in Kaunas on 29 November 1941.
Pitschen
Village
Early 19th century, Kingdom of Prussia. A small Jewish community in an Upper Silesian market town, just before Prussia's 1812 Emancipation Edict lifted the last restrictions. A 4×great-grandfather of the family was born here in 1811. The Edict, a year later, is exactly why families like his would soon scatter: once Jews could live and trade anywhere in Prussia, the small-town communities steadily emptied toward the cities. Pitschen is also the stage for the family's best story: the soldier who carried a wounded officer off the field at Leuthen, fought this town's magistrates for four years for the right simply to live here, walked to Berlin in winter to remind Frederick the Great of a battlefield promise — and was given the name Mühsam, 'arduous', by the King himself. The full story is under Numbers.
Poznań
City
Late 19th century, Prussia and the German Empire. Poznań had been one of the most important Polish-Jewish centres for centuries; by this period the community was thinning as Jews moved westward to larger German cities. A great-great-grandfather of the family was born here in 1872 before making exactly that move — west to Breslau.
Rybnik
City
Early 19th century, Kingdom of Prussia. A modest Upper Silesian Jewish community, primarily engaged in trade and small commerce. Two generations of the family were born here in the early 1800s, working among the traders of Silesia. When the later generations moved on, it was the pull every small Silesian community felt after Prussian emancipation in 1812 — the freedom to settle anywhere drew Jewish families out of the market towns toward the larger cities and their livelihoods.
Zülz
Village
18th to early 19th century, Habsburg then Prussian Silesia (Prussia took the region in 1742). Zülz was remarkable — one of only two towns in all of Silesia where Jews were permitted continuous residence from medieval times. Two generations of the family were born here: a 6×great-grandfather in 1741, and a 4×great-grandmother in 1814. After the 1812 Prussian Emancipation Edict allowed Jews to live anywhere in Prussian territory, the concentrated Jewish community in Zülz slowly dispersed, and this branch moved on to Pitschen.
Greece +
Salonika
City
15th century — Byzantine and briefly Venetian until 1430, then Ottoman. Refuge for the tree's Iberian branch: the Ottomans took in the Jews that Spain persecuted and expelled, and Salonika would in time grow into the largest Jewish city in the world. The line moved on to Istanbul within a generation — not in flight this time, but along the empire's own trade and rabbinic networks.
Iraq +
Baghdad
City
Mid-19th to mid-20th century, Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate, and then the Kingdom of Iraq. One of the oldest continuous Jewish communities in the world, tracing back to the Babylonian exile — around 40,000 strong by 1900, prosperous in trade, banking and crafts. Shattered by the Farhud in June 1941, a two-day anti-Jewish pogrom in the power vacuum following the collapse of the pro-Nazi Iraqi government — among the dead was a great-great-grandfather of the family. Those who left afterwards — and within a decade nearly all of Iraq's Jews did — were fleeing what followed: dismissals, arrests and property seizures after 1948, until the airlifts of 1950–51 carried away a community two and a half thousand years old.
Basrah
City
Turn of the 20th century, Ottoman Empire. A Jewish merchant community at the Gulf trade port, closely tied to Baghdad's much larger community further up the Tigris. A great-grandfather of the family was born here in 1900; the family later made its way to England, part of the broader Baghdadi-Jewish merchant diaspora that moved through the British Empire's trade networks — Bombay, Shanghai, Singapore, and London — and the family name was anglicised on arrival.
Ireland +
Dublin
City
Late 19th and early 20th century, United Kingdom-ruled Ireland. The Dublin branch of the family arrived by accident — Russian Jewish refugees bound for America, they landed in Liverpool, made their way across to Dublin, and settled in Portobello, the city's 'Little Jerusalem' that filled with Lithuanian and Russian arrivals in the 1880s-90s. The Irish-born daughter they raised there grew up with a thick Irish accent and eventually took it with her to London — the usual onward move for Ireland's small community, drawn to a Jewish world many times larger, with work and marriage prospects to match.
Italy +
Lucca
City
8th to 10th century. Traditional cradle of one of Ashkenaz's founding dynasties — a family of scholars who, in the 10th century, were invited north over the Alps to Mainz, the event that by tradition seeded Rhineland Jewry. They left not in flight but by invitation — a rarity in this tree.
Venice
City
8th to 10th century. The tree's longest traditional line passes through early-medieval Venice — communities living on the trade routes between the Land of Israel and Europe, the same routes by which scholars and their families moved west after the eighth century.
Bologna
City
13th to 15th century. A waypoint of the same traditional line as it moved between Italy and Germany. Italian Jewry lived under papal and civic pressure that tightened and loosened by decade — banking licences granted and revoked, residence permitted and rescinded — which kept scholarly families permanently mobile.
Padua
City
16th century. Home to one of Renaissance Italy's great yeshivot — academies of Jewish study; a celebrated rabbinic line here sent its sons north to Poland-Lithuania, where Jewish life offered a freedom the ghettos of Italy increasingly did not. One of them, by family tradition, was elected king of Poland — for a single night.
Latvia +
Daugavpils
City
Mid-17th to 18th century, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (soon after, Russian Empire). Known in Yiddish and in Jewish records as Dvinsk, the city would later become one of the great Lithuanian-Latvian yeshiva centres. This is one of the densest places in the whole tree: dozens of ancestors across a dozen interwoven lines were born here from the 1640s onward. Families rarely stayed put more than a generation or two — trade and marriage routes shuffled them constantly between Dvinsk, the Latgale shtetls and Riga.
Riga
City
17th to early 20th century, successive rule under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (to 1621), the Swedish Empire (to 1710), and then the Russian Empire. One branch of the family — traceable back through seven generations — was anchored in Riga continuously from the 1620s, when a 9×great-grandfather was born there, through to a great-grandmother born in 1901. Riga by 1900 had become a major Baltic Jewish centre, with roughly one in ten residents Jewish and flourishing Yiddish and Hebrew cultural life; the 1901-born great-grandmother left for England as part of the broader emigration out of the Russian Empire in the years around the 1903–1906 pogroms.
Rēzekne & Viški
Towns
17th to 19th century, Polish Livonia and then the Russian Empire. A dense cluster of Latgale branches — generation after generation in the shtetls of Rēzekne (Rezhitsa in the records), Malta and Viški, between Dvinsk and the Lithuanian border. Movement was constant but local, driven by trade and marriage, until the railway age and the pogrom years pushed the young toward Riga and the boats.
Lithuania +
Kaunas
City
Late 19th century and then the Second World War, Russian Empire and then Nazi-occupied Lithuania. Kovno was a major Litvak (Lithuanian-Jewish) centre — home to the famed Slabodka Yeshiva and a third Jewish by population. A great-grandfather of the family was born here in 1898; for young Jewish men of his generation the reasons to go all pointed the same way — Tsarist military conscription, the pogrom years after 1903, and the Tsar's mass expulsion of Kovno's Jews into the Russian interior in 1915. Four decades later, two great-great-grandmothers from other branches of the family were shot at the Ninth Fort on 29 November 1941, having been deported from Germany for that purpose. In the same year, that great-grandfather's own mother was killed a hundred kilometres west, in the Ponary massacres near Vilna — a third casualty from a third branch, all in 1941.
Kukliai
Village
Late 16th to 18th century, Grand Duchy of Lithuania within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. A tiny village in the southern Suvalkija region, near Lazdijai — and, improbably, one of the deepest wells in the whole tree: dozens of ancestors across more than a century of interlocking village lines were born here, from the 1590s onward. The lines eventually flowed out in every direction — north to Riga, east to the Latgale shtetls, even south to Galicia — the typical paths for village families, following marriage and trade toward the larger communities.
Lazdijai
Town
Late 16th to early 17th century, Grand Duchy of Lithuania. A small town in Suvalkija near the Polish border, part of the deep Lithuanian-Jewish heartland. An 11×great-grandfather of the family was born here in 1572, and the line continued here for another generation before moving north to Riga. The moves that followed were the ordinary mobility of Lithuanian Jewry — marriage and trade carried lines between towns, and eventually toward the opportunity of a Baltic port.
Veisiejai, Metelė & Seirijai
Towns
16th to 18th century, Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The villages around the Suvalkija lakes — recorded in the tree as Vishay, Metele and Seirijai — hold the densest documented cluster of all: whole networks of interrelated families, generation after generation, back to ancestors born in the 1540s. Lines left the way village lines always did, by marriage into the next town over — until, town by town, they reached the cities.
Vilnius & Anykščiai
City & town
15th to 17th century, Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The Šnipiškės quarter across the river from Vilna held one 17th-century branch; Anykščiai, north of Kaunas, holds the single deepest documented line in the Baltic part of the tree — ancestors recorded back to the 1390s. Jewish settlement in Lithuania was itself the result of an earlier flight: the Grand Dukes' charters drew families east when crusade-era and plague-era Germany expelled them.
The northern towns
Region
17th to 18th century — Pasvalys, the ‘New Town’ by Panevėžys, Marijampolė, Jurbarkas, Kelmė, Ariogala. The wider web of the Lithuanian branches, every one tied by marriage back to the Suvalkija and Latgale clusters. The Grand Duchy's Jews lived dispersed across hundreds of such towns; lines moved between them constantly, and the 19th century funnelled their descendants toward Kovno, Riga, and eventually the boats.
Moldova +
Chișinău
City
17th to 18th century, Principality of Moldavia under Ottoman suzerainty. A small early community on the trade roads between the Commonwealth and the Black Sea, with a branch in Telenești to the north; one line lived here for two generations before marrying north into the Latgale branches. Border principalities changed hands with every war, and Jewish families moved with the trade rather than wait for the next army.
Netherlands +
Amsterdam
City
17th century, Dutch Republic. The free city of the Sephardi world: Amsterdam tolerated open Jewish practice when almost nowhere in western Europe did, and the tree's Portuguese line passed through it as converso merchants returned to Judaism beyond the Inquisition's reach. Those who moved on did so for trade — Amsterdam was a junction, not a terminus, in the Sephardi Atlantic world.
Poland +
Będzin
Town
Early 18th to 19th century, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and then Congress Poland under the Russian Empire. A predominantly Jewish town near the Silesian border, where Jews had lived continuously since the medieval period and made up around four-fifths of the population by the 19th century. Multiple generations of the family were born here from the 1740s through the 1830s — among the deepest continuous Polish anchors in the tree. When the family finally left, the pressures were those of all Congress Poland: a crowded shtetl economy with too little work, Tsarist restrictions tightening after 1881, and the pull of relatives already in the West.
Chęciny
Town
Late 18th to mid-19th century, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and then Russian-ruled Congress Poland. A medieval market town in the Świętokrzyskie hills near Kielce, with one of the oldest continuous Jewish communities in Poland — its synagogue dates from the 1630s. Three generations of the family were born here, from a 5×great-grandfather around 1786 to a 3×great-grandmother in 1838. The same forces that later emptied towns like this — shtetl poverty and the Tsarist restrictions of the 1880s — carried this line, like so many, toward the cities and then the boats.
Ciechanów
Town
Mid-19th century, Congress Poland under the Russian Empire. A market town north of Warsaw whose Jewish population grew to roughly half the total before the First World War. A 3×great-grandfather was born here around 1846; his son moved west to Lubień Kujawski, and his grandson — the next generation on — would emigrate further still, to London's East End, joining the broader Russian-Jewish flight that intensified after the 1881 pogroms. That grandson would open the Cable Picture Palace on Cable Street.
Głogów
City
Late 17th to early 18th century, Habsburg Silesia (Prussian after 1742). A Lower Silesian city — German Glogau — where the family's deepest known Polish ancestor, an 8×great-grandfather, was born in 1670. The line continued here for several generations before moving south to Zülz — a legal calculation as much as anything, since in a Silesia where Jewish residence was otherwise precarious, Zülz was one of the rare towns where Jews could live without question. There this branch's continuous story properly begins.
Grabów nad Prosną
Town
Mid-19th century, Prussian-ruled Province of Posen. A small market town in the Greater Poland region, and the namesake of one of the family's lines. A 3×great-grandfather was born here in 1840; his son was born a generation later in Posen city itself. Posen's Jews spent the century leaving — thin small-town economies and the lure of full civic life in the German cities pushed each generation further west, this line included.
Kobylin
Town
Mid-19th century, Prussian-ruled Province of Posen. A small market town with a Jewish community of a few hundred. A 3×great-grandfather was born here in 1848; like the rest of Posen's small-town Jewry, the family's next generations moved on westward, where work and emancipated city life beckoned. His daughter, a generation later, would be born in Rawicz and end her life at the Ninth Fort in 1941.
Kazimierza Wielka, Opatów & Suwałki
Towns
15th to 19th century. Kazimierza Wielka, in the Świętokrzyskie countryside, holds one of the tree's notable medieval Polish anchors — a priestly line settled there in the late 1400s after wandering from Spain by way of Salonika and Istanbul; Opatów and Suwałki carry later branches. The draw of Poland was simple: Polish royal charters offered Jews protections that western Europe had revoked — until, centuries later, partition and the Pale reversed the bargain.
Kraków
City
16th to 17th century, Kingdom of Poland and then (from 1569) the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Kazimierz quarter in the golden age of Polish Jewry — by tradition one line here touches the circle of the city's great legal scholars. The catastrophes of the mid-17th century — the 1648 risings and the Swedish wars — battered the Commonwealth's Jewry and set even its most rooted families moving again.
Krotoszyn
Town
Mid-18th to mid-19th century, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and then (after partition) Prussian-ruled Province of Posen. A Greater Poland town with a Jewish community established in the 17th century. Several generations of the family were born here from the 1740s onward. Each generation's departures followed the same Posen pattern: as legal emancipation widened and the local economies narrowed, Jewish families left the market towns for Breslau, Berlin and beyond.
Lubień Kujawski
Town
Late 19th century, Congress Poland under the Russian Empire. A small shtetl in Kuyavia, like thousands of others where Yiddish-speaking Jewish communities formed the commercial backbone of market towns. A great-great-grandfather of the family was born here in 1877 before emigrating to London's East End in the same wave of post-1881 Jewish flight that brought so many families out of Russian-ruled Poland.
Radom
City
Early 20th century, Russian Empire until 1918 and then the Second Polish Republic. Unlike the rest of the family, this branch was Polish Catholic — part of the non-Jewish majority in a growing industrial town. A great-grandfather from this line escaped occupied Poland in 1939, making his way through Romania, Hungary and France to England, where he served as a wireless mechanic with Polish RAF squadrons — including at RAF Tempsford, the secret airfield from which SOE agents were flown into occupied Europe.
Raszków
Town
Mid-19th century, Prussian-ruled Province of Posen. A small market town in the Greater Poland region, in the Ostrów Wielkopolski (Adelnau) district. A 3×great-grandmother was born here in 1855. Her generation's moves were the standard Posen account — small communities dwindling as families followed work and wider rights west into the German cities.
Staszów
Town
Early-to-mid 19th century, Congress Poland under the Russian Empire. A market town in the Świętokrzyskie hills with one of Poland's oldest Jewish communities — four-fifths Jewish by the end of the 19th century. A 5×great-grandfather was born here in 1838, and the line reaches back one further generation to a 6×great-grandfather born around 1817. His son emigrated north to Warsaw, and the family eventually made its way to London's East End, part of the same post-1881 exodus that drew so many Russian-ruled Polish Jews westward.
Rawicz
Town
Mid-to-late 19th century, Prussian-ruled Province of Posen. Jews here were increasingly Germanised in language and custom; many eventually moved west to Breslau and Berlin. A great-great-grandmother of the family was born in Rawicz in 1878; she stayed behind when the next generation fled in 1939, was later deported, and was shot at the Ninth Fort in Kaunas on 29 November 1941.
Warsaw
City
Mid-to-late 19th century, Congress Poland under the Russian Empire. Warsaw held the largest Jewish community in Europe — hundreds of thousands of Yiddish and Polish speakers, a hub of Jewish publishing, theatre and politics. Several great-great-grandparents of the family were born here in the 1860s-70s; they emigrated to London's East End in the wave of Jewish flight that followed the 1881 pogroms and the 1882 May Laws — Tsarist legislation that restricted where Jews could live and work, driving roughly two million from the Pale of Settlement to Britain and America.
Portugal +
Porto
City
16th to 17th century. A Sephardi merchant family in the era of forced conversion: Portugal's Jews were converted en masse in 1497 and the Inquisition arrived in 1536, so families like this one lived outwardly Catholic and left when they could — on the classic routes of the conversos, the forced converts who kept their Judaism in secret: north to Amsterdam and across the Atlantic to Brazil, where this line's story in the tree continues.
Romania +
Bucecea
Town
Early 17th century, Bukovina — then the Principality of Moldavia. Not a home but a resting place: a Prague-born ancestor of the great scholarly dynasty, who had settled in Lithuania, was buried here around 1620 — presumably dying on the road, hundreds of miles from both. Rabbinic figures of that world travelled enormous distances between communities, and not all of them made it home.
Slovakia +
Nitra
City
Early to mid-19th century, Kingdom of Hungary under the Habsburgs. Nitra had a historic Jewish community with its own Orthodox yeshiva (religious academy) — a small but significant town in the Hungarian Jewish landscape. Two generations of the family were born here in the early 1800s before the line eventually made its way to Vienna — the great Hungarian-Jewish story of the century, as emancipation in 1867 and the new railways opened the imperial capital and the provincial communities sent their sons there in droves.
Spain +
Sepharad
Region
13th to 15th century. Sepharad is the Hebrew name for Spain. A priestly line lived here through the long medieval flowering of Spanish Jewry — until the massacres of 1391 and the rising persecution that would end in the 1492 expulsion. This branch read the signs early, leaving around 1400 for Salonika — then still Byzantine, definitively Ottoman from 1430 — under an empire that took in the Jews Spain cast out.
Turkey +
Istanbul
City
15th century, Ottoman Empire. The next stop for the Iberian priestly line after Salonika: newly conquered in 1453, the Ottoman capital actively recruited Jewish settlement to repopulate and rebuild the city. Within a generation the line resurfaces in southern Poland; the Ottoman lands and the Commonwealth were the two great refuges of the age, and families moved between them along the trade roads.
Ukraine +
Horodok
Town
17th to 18th century, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth — in the region the Habsburgs would later name Galicia. Gródek in the records — a market-town community west of Lviv, where several generations of one line lived after arriving, unusually, from a Lithuanian village by marriage. The partitions handed Galicia to the Habsburgs in 1772, and the slow squeeze of village economies kept its Jewish families moving thereafter.
Volhynia & the Dnieper towns
Region
17th century — Horokhiv, Piatigory, Cherkassy. Communities in the path of the 1648–49 Cossack risings, which destroyed hundreds of Jewish towns and sent the survivors fleeing west and north — the greatest catastrophe of early-modern Jewish history, and the likely reason these lines next appear in Lithuania.