Ahron Cohen (NK Manchester) - A Son of "The Hungarian Chelm"

Ahron Cohen is the Manchester delegate to the Iranian Holocaust convention; here is the information which we have obtained regarding his eminent assininity:

Everyone knows about Chelm, the Polish town where bagel holes were sold, and where the Va'ad Hanarronim ruled the town with an iron dunce cap. But Chelm was a parody, a Creedmoor Chronicles if you will, of an "ir ve'em beYisroel," where Torah permeated every cobblestone.

On the other hand, Szarkonoszvary - "Village of the Yellow Dung" - was the real thing. Isolated from the rest of Hungary by a river and a mountain range, Jews probably took refuge there during times of terrible persecution. But when times improved, all but two or three families left the little village for better lives elsewhere.

Now, a minyan cannot function without a Cohen, so the Cohen family was chief among those that stayed. Never mind that the family name was actually Werczberger and they were not really Cohanim. The family patriarch, Yossel Cohen, was a simpleton who could not spell Werczberger, so he decided on the easier to spell and remember Cohen. Since he was not the most ehrlicher Yid out there, he decided he would declare himself a descendant of Aharon Hacohen while he was at it. This meant he would be called to the Torah first as well as to be able to supplement his meager income as a dung delivery man with some pidyon haben gelt.

To understand the Cohen family, it must be understood that the families who remained in isolated little Szarkonoszvary were not the most intelligent Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Whether due to inbreeding, or lack of proper nutrition, or both, the Szarkonoszvary community consisted of very simple minded people.

And no family was simpler than that of the son of Yossel Cohen, Velvel, who married Shana Byla Cohen, his first cousin. Shana Byla was herself the unsophisticated and uneducable but notably shrewish product of a marriage between Yossel's brother and his own first cousin. Indeed, Shana Byla's mother was the town yente and was called Yachne Vashti Cohen, her birth name having been forgotten about five Purims after she was born.

As per Szarkonoszvary custom, Yossel dropped his son Velvel on a hard dirt floor head first when he reached the age of one year. This was the local segula against joining up with the Haskalah, the anti-Torah "enlightenment" that was becoming popular and stealing souls in large cities such as Budapest and Vienna. After all, if one was unable to understand Western philosophy, how could he join the Haskalah? Never mind that the brain damage inflicted by dropping a child on its head would also render him unable to study Torah; there was not even a Chumash to be found in illiterate Szarkonoszvary.

The minhag, carried out into the next generation by simple, partially crippled Velvel Cohen, would have truly disastrous effects upon his son, Ahron Cohen.

(more coming soon)