The Twin Cities and Their New Rebbe

BS"D

When one thinks of the Twin Cities today, chances are (s)he (as the politically correct West Coast Rebbetzin of Creedmoor-Alcatraz has asked us to write) has Minneapolis-S Paul, Missouri in mind.

Yet, while one of those Missourible cities has indeed inflicted a Failed Creedmoorer upon us, when a true and unfailed Creedmoorer speaks of the Twin Cities (s)h(it)e (which includes all the genders registered on welfare by the Admou"r) is referring to the pair of remote villages where Kalman Schmoigerman, the great great grandfather of the Admou"r, who indeed is still alive aged 243 according to Medicare records, established the first Hungarian antecedent of Creedmoorer Chassidus.

Those villages, not found on any map but still reporting a huge number of suspicious fires and floods to this very day, are apparently nestled in a rocky and hilly outcrop on the border between Hungary and what is now Albania.

They are called Szarkonosvary and Arschvary, or in Yiddish, Schvartzyohr and Ossvorf. And if one were to compare them to an earlier set of two cities in the nether reaches of Eretz Yisroel, which are now best known as the source of the active ingredient in the Ahava cosmetics which many a Creedmoorer boycotts, namely Sodom and Gomorrah, one would be forgiven for noticing the many similarities.

Szarkonosvary and Arschvary were founded by the notorious Vandals, and indeed when Kalman Schmoigerman placed a white flag on the abandoned fortress of Szarkonosvary, vandalism was very much in evidence.

The fortress was practically uninhabitable, except for a few rooms which were permeated with a strong smell of fermented plums. Those rooms were the abode of Szarkoszlas (Sar-kos-lash), the Count of Szarkonosvary, who was bestowed by the newly arrived pidgin Yiddish speaker with the noble name of Schvartzawolf.

Now, Schvartzawolf was in no way even remotely Jewish, regardless of the name which his soon to be lord of the manor had chosen for him.

He was a descendant of some Vandal chieftain or another. Once a semi-successful plum farmer, the alcohol soaked local noble now eked out a living brewing a pathetically primitive, but quite strong, liquor from a few rotten plums, some ketchup which somehow arrived in the town from local Gypsy traders, and just about any other available material, be it wood shavings, paper, topsoil, or three day old moldy bread.

The entrepreneurial Schmoigerman immediately saw the commercial potential of this highly toxic beverage. Not entirely devoid of knowledge when it came to intoxicational chemistry, he knew that it probably contained enough methanol to render anyone who consumed it temporarily blind.

And that meant that Schmoigerman could open a kretschma, or inn and tavern, similar to the one he had operated in his former abode somewhere in Carpathia.

In this new house of deceit, he could sell glasses and bottles full of this evil potion at a very high profit margin, as its effects would render its consumers unable to realize how much they were spending. Then he would simply have the reprehensible little Schvartzawolf rob the guests of his inn of every last bit of their possessions and relieve them of their steeds or other four legged forms of transportation. Finally, he would then have his new vassal carry his customers outside the town limits while they remained blind under the influence of the evil Schvartzawolf Slivovitz.

When they awoke, Schmoigerman planned to appear as their savior and provide them with a luxurious horse and buggy to transport them to their home villages. Once back in the guest's home village, the driver of said conveyance would demand a huge ransom in order to allow his passenger to disembark safe and sound.

Now, the question was - how could Kalman Schmoigerman get travelers to visit this isolated and foreboding little village and allow him to build yet another successful enterprise.

And the idea was not long in coming. He would convert Schvartzawolf to Judaism right then and there, teach him a few words of Yiddish, and send him out to the Jewish villages in the area to announce that the abandoned towns of Schvartzawolf and Oisvorf were now the holy court of the great and exalted tzaddik, the Szarkonosvary Rov, who of course was none other than Kalman Schmoigerman himself.

A conversion ceremony, consisting of a bris done in a fashion that would qualify as animal abuse if it had been performed on a four legged beast instead of the bestial Schvartzawolf, was performed, with Schvartzawolf repeating the words: "Harei ani meshuabad lecha Kvod Malchis HaRov HaGaon Kalman Schmoigerman, kedas Moloch veAzazel".

As far as the new Rebbe was concerned, he now had a fully Jewish gabbai, a sadistic little fool who would be more than content with five per cent of the daily take of the new Chassidus, paid to him in liquid currency, namely slivovitz of a quality one step above the poison he would proffer to all who paid him for a brocho or eytzo, and in semi-hard currency, namely the infamous kokosh cake which the Schmoigerman family had been producing since the days of their first inn in Sodom of old.

And that very night, Schvartzawolf went out on his three legged donkey to the nearby shtetlach to announce the arrival of a great tzaddik, a descendant of the Motzi Shem Ra of Shteinkopf.

With the literacy rate as abysymal as it was in that time and place, most of the locals truly believed there was such a tzaddik as this supposed ancestor of the newly self ordained Grand Rebbe Kalman Schmoigerman.

And the famous adage "There is a sucker born every minute" would soon be proven in the twin cities of Szarkonosvary and Arschvary.

Toldois Creedmoor: The Schmoigerman Chassune

BS"D

(I will move the rest of the Toldois blog posts back here as well and close the Toldois blog when I do. This follows from the last Toldois blog post about Kalman Schmoiger who became the first schmoiger to bear the Schmoigerman surname).

Now a wealthy man in Ruthenian terms thanks to his army recruitment schemes, and at the very ground floor of his soon to be famous tontine investment scheme, the time had come for Kalman Schmoigerman to marry.

To be sure, there was no girl in Ruthenia who would even so much as look at Kalman Schmoigerman, despite his great wealth.

Years of inbreeding going back to the times of isolation of the deMenubal clan in cliffbound Montetres had produced a specimen as revolting as he was reprehensible. Kalman Schmoigerman was said to be the prototype for anti-Semitic cartoons, as he was cursed with a beaklike nose, a pinched face, a bent back, rounded shoulders, and a stature considered short even for the time and place of his birth. His beady eyes, black as vultures, rounded out the picture of a man who looked on the outside exactly as he was on the inside.

So who was he to marry?

The answer came from nearby Nagyszar, a village located on the Hungarian side of the regional border. Her name was Schprintza Schvartz, but she was actually named for a common ancestor of both chosson and kalla, namely Senzasperanza de Menuval. And her original name was Swarcsmuk, for she was a descendant of the successful and ehrlich Yehuda der Schmuckler, a jeweler from the Rhineland who had settled in Hungary and unknowingly married a de Menubal, who had been adopted from her dysfunctional family by a childless couple who raised her as would befit the daughter of a renowned talmid chochom and his wealthy wife.

Therefore, his wife Rochel was indeed a pleasant, kind and gentle woman who seemed to have escaped the curse of her Sodomite ancestors.

However, the Swarcsmuk name and dynasty came to be because Shmarya, known as Schmendrik, who one of her four sons with this jeweler, reverted to de Menuval type.

At the time of the passing of their father, the four sons were supposed to have received equal shares of the inheritance, for Yehuda der Schmuckler, a talmid chochom and baal chesed who never expected to live as long as he did, had given the bechor, Nissan, his double portion years ago, and Reb Nissan subsequently left Hungary to establish himself in London.

However, the other two brothers faced ruin, for the reprobate Schmendrik attempted to obtain the bulk of the fortune by summoning them to the beis din of Szarkonosvary and Arszvary, an unrecognized institution which served two very remote and isolated towns known for their ignorance. The dayan, Koirach Wercberger, who was probably an ancestor of Ku Klutz Karta - Manchester stalwart and excomunicatee Ahron Cohen, was as incompetent as he was corrupt and after receiving a handful of counterfeit crowns from the litigant, he decided the case as follows:

Nissan, the oldest - all white jewels
Shmarya Schmendrik, the litigant - all black jewels
Moishe, the largest in size - all large jewels
Chaim Yankel, the smallest in size - all small jewels

The other two brothers in Hungary, as well as Nissan in London, simply equitably combined and then redivided that which they were awarded and went about with their lives as ehrlicher Yidden. Indeed, many Hungarian Jews could be descended from them, for they took the names Weisz, Grosz and Klein respectively in a comical reference to the comical beis din case when forced to take surnames. (Other sources say that a corrupt bureaucrat tried to solicit a bribe from the two brothers who remained in Hungary, and when neither one was willing to play along, he assigned the name Grosz to the diminutive Chaim Yankel and the name Klein to Moishe, a veritable mountain of a man, albeit as decent and honest as he was huge and strong.)

But Shmarya Schmendrik boldly took the name of Swarcsmuk (pronounced Schvartzschmuck) because he was so proud at having received what he passed off, rightfully or wrongfully as priceless pieces of onyx and black pearls.

By then, the name Swarc or Schwarz had been bestowed on many a Jew in the region, and because Shmarya Swarcsmuk had developed a reputation as a complete reprobate who regularly dealt in counterfeit stone and metal along with stolen merchandise, those Schwartzes began to refer to him as Smuk (Schmuck) so as to make sure they were not assumed to be related to him.

Of course, a century or so later, with the first Jewish immigration to the United States, that innocent German word for jewel which had become associated with this most corrupt of men would in time enrich the American English lexicon as a somewhat risque word for a fool.

Kind, gentle Rochel, the wife of the late Yehuda der Schmuckler and mother of the four sons, could take no more after the absurd beis din case. After a month of hearing of Shmarya Schmendrick's shameful post litigation escapades, she knew her time had come. She also knew that she had to tell her story to her reprobate son, so that he knew from whence he had emerged.

She summoned Schmendrick to her bedside, and her son obeyed only because he knew he could relieve her of her valuables once she slipped into her final sleep.

And before she began her journey to Gan Eden, she told her son: "You are the continuation of the curse! You, how did I believe I would escape this! I was adopted by a talmid chochom and his rich wife, a childless couple who were told by the rov of my village to rescue me from my own parents who were always traveling and often in prison. Rumors were that I was a deMenubal but boruch Hashem even now I don't look like one, maybe my father wasn't who he was supposed to be, maybe my real mother was divorced, who knows anymore? My father's mother and father were cousins, because they were the grandchildren of that Yachne Shprintza Menivelman who everyone said was cursed, that her great-grandmother was Senz'Esperanza from Montetres, in Spain, from the de Menubals who ran the three card games and got thrown out of Spain for that long before the rest of the Yidden were. My son, when I saw what you did to your brothers, and how Hashem protected them as He protected Yaakov from his brother through His shaliach the Szarkonosvary Dayan, I know it is you who will be cursed forever, for bringing back the curse of Senz'Esperanza, of the Hopeless One. Listen to me! You must name your first daughter Shprintza and make sure she marries only another de Menuval. The de Menuvals are known in Ruthenia by our oldest and most accursed name that we got before korban bayis sheini, and they are called Shoiteh, Menivel, Gas Ruach, which is sometimes shortened to Schmoiger. Otherwise this curse will continue through you until the end of time! If you do that then the rest of your children will be saved and even Shprintza will live in great wealth that will pass through for generations!"

After her son agreed to follow her instructions (a given as it turns out because Shprintza did not grow up to be fit for anyone else besides a de Menuval - Schmoiger), Rochel, the wife of Yehuda der Schmuckler, fell into a coma that was followed a week later by her passing. And once her reprobate son cleaned her luxurious abode, his very childhood home, of every thing of value, he ran off on a stolen horse to send word to his brothers, who arrived in time to assure she would be properly buried and remembered for her life of good deeds rather than for her reprobate son. Hardly in need themselves, they were not surprised at all that nothing of value remained in the home but they did not have the desire to pursue their brother.

The gravestone under which she would rest listed Shmarya Schmendrik as having predeceased her on the day of the beis din case, which was in line with a cherem issued against him by several legitimate rabbonim. And Mamme Rochel was mourned throughout the land, with no mention made of Shmarya Schmendrik except by some who said, "She was not Rochel but Rivka, for she was such a fine lady but she had three Yaakovs and an Esav for sons."

And that fictitious date of death inscribed in stone would serve Shmarya Schmendrik's future son in law in good stead. After marrying Schmendrik's shrewish Shprintza in a ceremony held at one of the many Schmoigerman bawdy houses, and officiated by none other than the now completely senile Dayan of Szarkonosvary and Arsvary, Kalman Schmoigerman and his new eizer legamrei negdo Shprintza would mastermind the very first haimishe insurance fraud, the "Naye Karpatische Tontine" scheme.

Since it depended on the masterminds' ability to prove that participants had died before the expiration of the policies (today known as term life policies but with a rather odd payoff provision that meant the sum of the policy would end up with the last survivor), a funeral was duly held for what was billed to be the corpse of Shmarya Swarcsmuk, dredged up from sea after a terrible shipwreck.

In reality, Shmarya Swarcsmuk was simply, with the emphasis on simply because he had moved to Arsvary (known in Yiddish as Oisvorf) known under his more accurate epithet of Schmendrik Schmuck, and no Oisvorfer (later shortened to Oisvorf) was literate enough to read a gravestone in a far off village. But they and their Szarkonosvary neighbors were gullible enough to buy life insurance in its primitive tontine form from the "Karpatianer Tontine Gescheft".

As for the rest of the participants who were needed to predecease the Schmoigermans so as to enrich them, well, the title of the next installment of the Schmoigerman saga is:

"They Shoot Horses, Don't They"

(more coming by Sunday IYH)

The Yichis Breef Returns - El Rey Samuel Gronem de Menubal de Toracinia

BS"D

The eldest son of Don Hayim Vital, El Rey Samuel Gronem de Menubal de Toracinia, brought the reputation of the de Menubal family to new lows with a whole host of schemes and scams which took advantage of the least fortunate of the population of the entire Spanish Empire.

Indeed, his infamous "Flores de Toracina" scam was known as far afield as what is now Tangier, Morocco and was then part of Spanish Andalucia.

First of all, El Rey Samuel Gronem was the first Jew in the Spanish empire to take on a non-Jewish and non-Arabic name. Somewhere, he had heard the name Geronimo, and decided that he would have a better chance of having his new medical discovery accepted if he added this name to his own, because at the time it was an unusual name. However, in Jewish pronunciation, it was truncated to Gronem (note: this is NOT a correct etymology for the name Shmuel Groinem and applies only to descendants of the de Menubal family, most of whom only exist on the section 8, welfare, Medicaid and SSI rolls and list Rabbi Dovid Azazel Schmoigerman or one of his wives as their legal guardian).

And El Rey Samuel Gronem, who indeed was recognized by himself and his handful of loyal subjects as the king of Toracinia after the passing of his extinguished father, also claimed to be a skilled physician, in the tradition of many Jews of the region.

But this self appointed king and physician was actually an expert in bloodletting not of the medical variety but of the financial sort. And his fortune was based on the "discovery" of an interesting species of flower growing in the precincts of Toracinia. It was yellow and of no particular beauty, but its real interest to the budding pharmaceutical tycoon was its reproductive form, in which it sprouted a ball of puffy white seeds that would disperse with the wind and eventually grow into yellow flowers before reaching the puffball stage.

If you guessed that the "Flores de Toracinia" were but common dandelions, you would be one hundred and fifty per cent correct, one hundred and fifty per cent being the wholesale markup which was charged by the "Compania Santa de Flores de Toracinia" - the "Holy Company of the Flowers of Toracinia" for packages of either the dried or fresh flowers or the white, puffy seeds.

And what were these seeds supposed to do for whoever ate or inhaled them? Well, the only people who could attest to their benefits were the "Locos de Toracinia," the insane folk who had been living in caves and mountain dugouts in the rocky, infertile region. Yet, the great pharmaceutical tycoon to be, the one and only El Rey Samuel Gronem de Menubal de Toracinia, would transcribe their stories of visions of grandeur, of increased energy, of being great noblemen and kings, and claim that all of this was due to their ingestion of the Flores de Toracinia.

In short, the self appointed king and florid scammer claimed to be selling hallucinogens. But to those for whom hallucination did not appeal, he claimed that eating the seeds as opposed to inhaling them would produce a calming effect, even for rambunctious children and teenagers. Yes, this great medical discovery was the predecessor to Ritalin, in that it supposedly caused hallucinations in susceptible individuals while calming others.

And who would decide what category each customer belonged in and therefore what price he would pay? Why, of course, a veritable army of gullible salesmen who themselves had to pay an initial fee of hundreds of reals in authentic currency to buy their own stock.

Yes, El Rey Samuel Gronem de Menubal de Toracinia was also the predecessor of Herbalife, Amway, and other MLM programs, both legitimate and in the case of its founder, completely spurious. Regardless of how many packages of Flores de Toracinia each "marco" (the first name used by the salesmen regardless of their actual name also became a term of derision for their customers and was the source of the term "mark" for a sucker who is recruited for a de Menubal type scam) sold, the "Compania Santa" would make a huge profit, for dandelions grow like weeds even in rocky Toracinia.

But the millions of reals in profit that came into the coffers of sovereign Toracinia, along with the profits from its debased currency that still was exchanged for actual gold at a ratio of 1:80, was not enough for its king.

He soon turned his greedy eyes toward a particularly weatherbeaten and unappetizing section of the Moorish fortress that had purportedly existed in Toracinia and was now a heap of rubble. The castle was still known as "Crede des Moros" - "The Faith of the Moors," and soon it would be put to use as a medical treatment facility of a type similar to a modern day facility in Queens, New York that bears a similar name.

In other words, El Rey Samuel Gronem de Menubal de Toracinia would build an insane asylum amidst the ruins of his purported fortress. While the patients may have been insane, its founder's motive in building the new hospital was, as always, pure greed.

Toracinia and Crede de Moros - The de Menubal kingdom

BS"D

Don Vital Hayim de Menubal de Toracinia, whose name was now officially rendered as El Rey de los Reyes Vital Hayim in order to reflect his new self-inflicted kingly status, would soon find out that his choice of land was a fortunate one indeed.

On the very edge of the outcrop, there lived a sort of clan or tribe of rather strange people, who claimed to see visions of horses and snakes and the moon and unicorns dancing around the land.

Today, we would call them schizophrenics and treat them accordingly, but at that time they were either seen as possessed by spirits, or mad. Among them were two older men who claimed to be personalities from earlier times, obscure or perhaps renowned noblemen and squires whose names meant little to their new overlord, Don Hayim Vital de Toracinia.

He found that one of them, a dissheveled, unkempt alcoholic of indeterminate age, inhabited what appeared to be the ruins of an old fortress, and claimed to be "El Defendante del Crede de Moros" - the Defender of the Faith of the Moors. As far as de Menubal was concerned, this meant that the ruins were of an old Moorish castle, and it was time for him to remove the harmless old lunatic and establish himself as "El Defendante Real del Crede de Moros," or the Regal Defender of the Creed of the Moors.

So, the Don deftly dismembered and disposed of the now former inhabitant of the castle, and displaced another squatter, Alfonso de Majnoun, with a duly produced parchment showing that he, Don Hayim Vital de Menubal, was now the Regal Defender of the Creed of the Moors and therefore the only rightful inhabitant of the castle.

He was decent enough to provide the second unfortunate with one of his forged alms cards, and to send him to the nearest Jewish town where he was able to use the cards to obtain food free of charge at the local branch of HyperNebela. Of course that food was paid for by the alms fund of the kehilla, who had never seen this latest arrival before but had to accept him as he could not communicate.

Now, Don Vital Hayim was ready for action as he set out to use the remaining psychotic squatters as free labor to turn the castle into the Grand Palace of Toracinia del Crede de Moros, and to have two slightly more talented and lucid squatters melt down base metal and plate it with adulterated gold before placing it in a hastily manufactured stamping device that embossed: "Cinco Reals del Toracinia de Crede del Moros" and a picture of a shechita knife on the front, with a legend "accepted as real tender in all subterranean transport of the Lands of the Empire of Spain, Portugal and Andalusia" on the back.

In other words, by issuing phony tokens, Don Vital Haim de Menubal, El Defendante Real del Crede de Moros de Toracinia, had managed to build what was in essence the first subway. It consisted of a tunnel dug under the unusual little town's kosher slaughterhouse which in turn led to the mikve. Visitors were pulled by a donkey drawn wagon and deposited in the mikve, clothes and all. Residents and visitors were lured to purchase these coins with real gold or silver coins, and then forced to use the subway by rather menacing local psychotics, each of whom received a token a day as their token wages.

And Don Vital Hayim would melt down all the legitimate coins he received from travelers, after having his trusted smelter make a proper impression of their head and tail sides so that he could stamp them on recycled iron swords which he melted down and then plated ever so lightly with the gold of the legitimate coins.

These new counterfeit base metal coins, in high denominations, were gladly accepted by market sellers who handed over change amounting to at least eighty five centavos on the real in legitimate coinage. Invariably, a Toracinian would appear at the market in rags, saying he had come to buy one egg, or one sharp pepper, for his King. And the merchants would accept his real and give him just that, with quite a handful in change.

The eggs were saved for throwing at chariots which entered Toracinia on Shabbat, which was called for a different day each week. And the peppers were soaked to make a blinding, irritating solution that was added to the de Menubal ancestral product "La Barata" so that the mixture could be thrown at women and girls who dared enter the new kingdom on days when entrance was restricted to men.

As for the kosher slaughterhouse, it schechted far more customers than meat. Since Toracinia was so well known for its adherence to tznius, unwitting consumers from as far afield as Yemen would travel to purchase kosher meat there. They were asked to put up a fifty per cent deposit in verifiable coinage and to enter the mikveh via the tunnel before even choosing a cut of meat. Of course they could not enter without purchasing a token, so that they purchased same in the hallway of the butcher shop and handed it to the rather floridly psychotic mikveh attendant, who insisted he was Avraham Avinu and was also the mashgiach for the schechita. Avraham Avinu would then appear after tevila and prove that the unwitting mark had paid for the meat with a token, and that he had paid with counterfeit coinage, which was of course actually produced in Toracinia and substituted for the real coins which the traveler had brought.

After the mark forked over a few more coins, he would be presented with a package of "Nacional Ebreo" smoked meat, a rather unreliable and distasteful product, simply wrapped in a certificate signed by the illiterate wannabe Avraham Avinu as mashgiach. If any customer would protest, he would be duly attacked by the mashgiach, and then would quickly get on his horse or donkey and leave town fast.

But all of these scams were nothing compared to the "Flores de Toracina" and "Bayit del Reposo (Rest Home) del Crede del Moros" that was perpetrated by the son of Don Vital Hayim, Don Samuel Gronem, Gronem being a corruption of the name Geronimo (Jerome).

Coming on Friday...The Kingdom of Toracinia

BS"D

Forget Don Quixote del Toboso, or is it Dulcinea del Toboso. Meet El Rey de los Reyes Melech Malchei Hamelachim Vital Haim de Menubal de Toracinia....

"He found exactly what he was looking for when, thrown out of his house yet again by his mother in law, he went off for a long ride on his purloined steed Hamor, reaching a rocky outcrop claimed by no one and inhabited only by a flock of birds. This outcrop and the surrounding few hectares would become the Kingdom of Toracinia, consisting only of a palace and a mint which produced coinage bearing the emblem of the de Menubal de Toracinia dynasty......a squirrel feeding on acorns and the infamous "pan de kokosh", as the vile and deplorable de Menubal stock in bakery trade was now called..."

"Knowing that he risked execution for his many financial shenanigans and sale of adulterated foodstuffs, he often feigned insanity in public. de Menubal claimed he moved his family to the foreboding rocky lands in order to harvest the famous flora de Toracinia that was known to help in cases of extreme madness.............."

The True Beginnings of the Schmoigerman Scammer Dynasty - Don Vital Haim de Menubal part 2

BS"D

The enterprising and thoroughly corrupt Hymie would soon find a new use for his mentor Du'ecq's "la barata". He found out that a concentrated solution of Du'ecq's adulterated wine vinegar would soften wood, enabling him to change the inscriptions on the famous wooden alms entitlement cards that were his family's stock in trade ever since they arrived in Spain from Eretz Yisroel.

So, he began to issue his own cards and then to soften them, change the inscriptions on them, and resell them after one mark after another purchased them from him at 80 or 90 per cent of face value and found themselves essentially paying 150 per cent more for staples at the market as the counterfeit cards only entitled the bearer to a small and basic food ration. The rest of the ration was indeed paid for by the community, and went to none other than Hymie himself.

In addition, Hymie would augment his income by running what became known as "la juega de Sheketz Arroz," the infested rice game. He would lend one particular market stallholder money at exorbitant interest, and send thugs to mark all of his dried goods with the damning phrase "Sheketz Arroz" - "an abomination in the rice". This meant that the goods were not kosher, and that most gentiles would reject them as well due to insect infestation. Miraculously, a Menubal agent would appear at the stand with a wagon load of "BaDaTz Sefarad Mehadrin" grains, certified with a barely visible kosher seal, of course by none other than "Haham Vital Haim de Menubal". Never mind that such a certification was not even worth the material used in manufacturing the seal; most women in Spain were illiterate and had no idea what the seal meant. Indeed, consumers believed that the grains were special and therefore willing to pay three times the price of regular grain.

Soon enough, Hymie Nebela became a wholesale grain trader, or more accurately a wholesale fraudster of the first order. He invented a new measure called the "sharp ton" (tonna acuta), which consisted of perhaps three tenths of an actual ton, the remainder of the crate being filled with nothing but what was termed "wind and hot air". Of course the price for a "sharp ton" of Nebela flour or rice would equal four times that of an actual ton of non kosher certified grains, and anyone who complained or refused to take the Nebela grains on credit at exorbitant interest would awaken the next morning to find an armed thug and a sign "Nebela Foods Limited" adorning their stall. By now, practically every merchant who had not been driven to ruin by the Sheketz Arroz scheme was forced to buy from the Nebela enterprises.

And since royal titles were easy enough to obtain in the various kingdoms that comprised the Spanish territories, even Hymie Nebela became a knight, taking the royal name of "Don Vital Haim de Menubal, Duca de Vaca". In time, Duca de Vaca, which meant Duke of Cow, would become the basis for an old Spanish song mocking the easy availability of such titles. And later on, in the colonies, English colonists would mistranslate the title of the song as "Duke of Earl", also mocking spurious titles of nobility which were as available in England for the right price just as they were in Spain.

Now, as a nobleman, Don Vital Haim de Menubal, who still claimed to be the very model of a Spanish rabbinical scholar, could realize his long held goal. He could rise to the very greatest heights of deceit and avarice by opening his own private mint, using the same principles of honesty and manipulation of weight and measures that he relied upon to invent and popularize the "sharp ton".

All Don Vital Haim de Menubal had to do was to find a willing king with a willing kingdom. This, as we shall see, proved quite simple for this man of great imagination and even greater moral turpitude.

Don Vital Haim - from Nebela to De Menubal..making a mint the old fashioned way - part 1

BS"D

Certainly, the most distinguished ancestor in the Schmoigerman-Nebela-de Menubal family tree was Don Vital Haim de Menubal. Born Hymie Nebela in Montres, Vital Haim de Menubal would actually become the proprietor of a mint of his very own.

Having been banished from Montres at the age of 12 when the area came under the rule of a nobleman who was determined to remove the "pestilence known as the Nebela family" from his fiefdom, de Menubal found himself in a rather sleazy part of the great city of Seville, where his father quickly established himself as a purveyor of many illicit pleasures of the flesh. Young Hymie was of course enlisted to help his distinguished parents, usually as a tout in the now famous "Tres Cartas de Monte" card games, but also as a runner for illicit cash and as a carver of forged wooden alms cards.

But Hymie knew that he could do far more with his inherited penchant for fraud and deceit. So, using the phony alms cards which were given to him as bar mitzvah presents, he obtained bug and excrement infested flour, offal, and rotten or overly dried carobs. With that, he began to bake and sell a product which his ancestor Todros had sold in his take out store in pre churban Yerushalayim, namely pat d'kokosh. Pat d'kokosh was indeed the ancestor of today's kokosh cake, but unlike today's version, which was actually based on an updated and sanitized recipe used by Atilla the Hun who in turn copied it from a de Menubal who supplied him with weaponry for his army, it was a rather disgusting concoction, which included not cocoa, but kokosh, an obscure Aramaic word referring to what is today known in any mikveh dressing room as "dreck". (Apparently the Huns, ancestors of the Hungarian Magyars, saw the similarity in appearance between dreck and cocoa and adapted the word kokosh to mean the cocoa used in the sanitized version of kokosh cake.)

At this time, Jewish families began to mark their homes with carvings of noble animals - for instance an Aryeh Yehuda would mark his home with a lion, or a Binyamin Zeev with a wolf. In due time these animals would become part of the family names taken by Jews to avoid being known as Jews during the Inquisition; Lopez from Lobo, meaning a wolf, or de Leon from leon, which even a graduate of Toire veKanois should recognize as the Spanish word for lion.

And young Hymie often found his way to a home situated far from the rest of the stately homes of the "juderia", or Jewish quarter, and marked with that most ignoble of animals, the lowly rat.

This was the abode of Solomon Du'ecq, "La Rata de la Juderia," a miserable little rodent of a man who made his rather prosperous living not only as a swindler who claimed he needed investment to build palaces for some noble or another, but also as a moser who would report Jews for violations of unenforced rules, such as those pertaning to manufacture of wine for Kiddush. This was because Du'ecq, in some dialects pronounced with a soft R, similar to the Arabic 'ghayin, in place of the u, had yet another enterprise; relabeling vinegar as wine and selling it as "wine of the Cohen Gadol*," which he had ostensibly had in his family's possession since the dispersal of Jews to Spain after the churban. His wine was also known as "La Barata" as it was less expensive than proper wine, and soon, cleaning ladies from the Latin American colonies who cleaned homes in the Juderia would learn that "La Barata" was actually not bad for washing floors.

But the Jewish matrons, who were familiar with Greek words from their husbands' commercial travels, referred to it as "La Economicqa," also meaning "the cheap stuff". And they would also find out fast enough that they did not need to buy "La Economicqa" from the reprehensible Du'ecq, but that they could find a similar product, namely simple diluted vinegar, in any marketplace throughout the Spanish Empire. (Years later, another renegade, perhaps a Du'ecq descendant, would migrate from Aleppo to Ottoman Palestine and begin selling liquid chlorine to his fellow Sefardim who searched for "la economicqa" in then vinegar starved Eretz Yisroel. His fraud backfired as the chlorine proved even more efficient for cleaning floors, and thus was born ekonomika, the national cleaning product and kiddush staple of Eretz Yisroel).

Of course Du'ecq needed to put an end to that, and Hymie de Menubal would be the one who showed him how, to the great benefit of both and to the detriment of every Jewish balabuste in the Spanish Empire.

*(It is indeed believed that Du'ecq was the ancestor of the noted Pedro Domecq, a very legitimate vintner and distiller who founded the House of Pedro Domecq, now part of global giant Pernod Ricard. Apparently, a renegade member of the clan, forced to live as a Catholic after the Inquisition, actually engaged in legitimate commerce (an anathema for the Du'ecq clan) and began selling proper wine and brandy while changing his name to avoid both persecution and association with the Du'ecq clan. This is quite plausible as the main product of Pernod Ricard is pastis, known in the Jewish world as arak. It is known that Solomon Du'ecq's grandson, also named Solomon, began selling arak distilled from worn out wooden alms cards, moldy pat d'kokosh, and various and sundry other forms of detritus and ordure. Moreover, arak is often referred to as dreck especially by unwitting yeshiva bochurim who taste it for the first time on Purim and find themselves suffering from headaches and gastric distress for several days.)

Correction...and the yichus goes even further back, to Sdom!

BS"D

This from the Haham baLeylot of the Sefardi Congregation of Creedmoor (Frenkel's Shul), Haham Rahamim Loyashar:

"Gimpel, your information about the cards is not correct. I am also a de Menubal de Montres on my mother's side and we were always told this about the "tres cartas":

In Spain of old, the poor were supported anonymously, with wooden cards which they took to the market and which entitled the bearer to free food and clothing that was then tallied by the merchant and paid for by the communal tzedaka fund.

Our ancestors forged and sold these cards, and also used them in their card tricks that later became three card monty when printed playing cards replaced the cumbersome shingle sized wooden alms cards. Once the counterfeit cards were forged and sold, the situation became such that the community tzedaka fund was paying for food and clothing for thousands of poor people. Actually, the Jewish population of the town was perhaps 1000 with maybe 30 true aniyim or cholim. Yet, just as today with our Federal chessed program fraud, somehow 40,000 aniyim were getting free food from the communal till!

Of course most of the free food which was obtained by Nebela shills or family members was being exported to other parts of the Spanish empire, or sold in one or more of the Nebela restaurants, take out shops or even the famous HyperNebela supermarket. The rest of the cards were sold to renegade Jews and goyim alike. In fact, the phrase "Shygetz Aross" is based on the Judeo-Spanish phrase "Sheketz, arroz," meaning that there is an unclean creature in the rice, but also a code meaning that a non-Jew was coming to buy food with an improperly obtained tzedaka fund card.

HyperNebela was the first major kosher store in medieval Spain to accept both forged and authentic alms cards, albeit of course for its own reasons, namely both collecting cash from the alms fund AND reselling the cards to unwary travelers who were told it was a sort of identification card that was necessary to carry when traveling in the region.

Actually, it was an identification card of sorts as we Nebelas controlled much of the brigandry in the region and when one of our highway robbers saw this card he knew that the traveler was a mark and a sucker who was therefore fair game. We were true followers in the ways of Sdom ve'Amorah, but rather than getting burned and turned into pillars of salt, today we are the leaders in pillage when it comes to incinerating buildings and salting insurance proceeds away in Lichtenstein, Panama and the Cayman Islands.

In fact our earliest traceable ancestor is someone who fled Sdom before it was turned into a pillar of salt. The chain of descent from the Baalei HaChessed d'Sdom is lost, however, and only our reputation for chessed and mischar al pi minhag Sdom remains.

So, the three cards referred either to the three alms cards per resident that were forged by Yedidya Todros around the time of the naming of the city, or to the three wooden alms cards that marks placed their bets on while playing the predecessor of Three Card Monty."

Hope this helps, and thank you for preserving the history of our distinguished family for future generations of avarice and deceit.

Haham Rahamim Loyashar de Menubal de Montres, Samach Mem."

The Origins: A Stone Inscription

BS"D

Palestinian archaeologists who dug up a mound not far from Har HaBayis in a harebrained attempt to prove the absence of a Jewish presence in Yerushalayim were dumbstruck.

Here was what they dreaded the most; an engraved stone panel that, while worn, was clearly a list of prices for takeout food from a kosher butcher. Stymied in their attempt to disprove the Jewish connection to Yerushalayim, they hurriedly covered the mound and returned to their bomb making workshop in Abou Qalb, where in due time they obliterated any traces of themselves in a work accident.

But the hastily covered over mound attracted the attention of none other than Creedmoorer stalwart Boylish Krechtz, the famous kanoi of garbage can burning fame. As Krechtz, born Boaz Kramer, was a former Hebrew University student become kanoi "baal tshuva" (who was actually on the payroll of both the ShaBaK and the Admou"r who in any case may well be collaborating with one another), he recognized the mound as an archaeological dig similar to one he had participated in before his conversion (which was said to be a way of escaping cocaine and Ecstacy charges stemming from a number of rave parties he organized for his fellow students).

Knowing he could resell anything he found there to any number of museums under the guise of getting it out of Zionist hands and therefore aiding his beloved Palestinian cause, Krechtz uncovered the mound and found a stone panel with the words:

"Pat d'kokosh. 11 dinar"
"Basar d'flanken 31 dinar"
"Chamar 18 dinar litra"
"Kigel d'Karta 17 dinar"

In other words, he had found the window banner from a take out shop that had existed on this very spot centuries earlier.

And then his curiosity became even greater when he saw the slab of stone was seemingly vandalized with words that looked like "Cherem d'BaDatz Sanhedrin Yerushalayim".

He called his beloved Rebbe, who thanked him profusely, and asked him to decipher any other words which he could manage to read.

The only other word not destroyed by time contained the letters nun, beis, lamed - novol or perhaps nevela.

It took the Admou"r only one second to realize that his chossid had found the menu of his ancestor's Shabbos take out store, which had been put in cherem by the "BaDaTz Sanhedrin Yerushalayim" for selling nevelos.

And when his ancestor Todros escaped Yerushalayim years before the churban, after being banished by that very beis din which put him in cherem, he would bring with him a title deed to the second Beis HaMikdash. Of course, it was forged in the same stone workshop where he had printed his Shabbos take out menus.

And the most distinguished descendant of Todros the carrion vendor was his grandson, known as "Don Yedidya Teodoro Nebela," the Don in this case being a similar honorific to that used by the fictitious Don Vito Corleone. After a series of expulsions and banishments for various and sundry defalcations, he went on to settle in a town that became known as "Montres," a short version of its full name of "Monte de las Tres Cartas," or mountain of the three cards. While two of the three cards were said to be the shnei luchois habris, or at least the smashed luchois that Don Teodoro claimed he possessed and would sell time and time again to Jewish travelers, it was not known what the third card represented until very recent times when welfare cheques were replaced with EBT cards.

Indeed, it was here that a card game would be invented that would bring the first Nebelas a great deal of money and cement their nefarious reputation. That card game, the simplest of sleight of hand tricks, would later make its way to the New World with a stowaway on the Columbus ship "Pinta". And among English speaking arrivals to what had been Nieuw Amsterdam, the game became known as Three Card Monty, in honor of the town of origin of the family which had introduced it to the colonies.

The Nebelas of Montres would establish themselves quite nicely with the proceeds from their game, their resale of the luchois habris, and of course the ancestral trade of carrion butchery.

They also amassed many a cherem and were more than once sentenced to banishment, but this hardly mattered to them. Even then, the Nebelas were kanoim who despised the official rabbanim and negidim of Spain as "just a bunch of koifrim and tzioinim" and they soon established their own independent kehilla.

Soon, an even more extinguished descendant of Todros the take out man would go one step further and essentially establish his own kingdom, or at least his own currency.

He was Don Vital Haim Nebela, who would be renamed Don Vital Haim de Menubal, the de prefix indicating a royal favor, or in this case, well, a royal pain in the posterior.

(Next Post: From Nebela to de Menubal: Knighted for Running His Own Mint)

The Vast and Noble Yichus of the Admou"r meCreedmoor

BS"D

One of the highlights of the ongoing Moisdos Creedmoor d' Pluto melave malka was the unveiling of the noble, and rather straight, Schmoigerman ilan hayochsin (family tree).

More is coming tomorrow as we decipher the document, but the highlights are:

1) The Schmoigerman family tree began in a village in Spain called "Monte de los Tres Cartas", shortened to Montres, and it is from there that a well known card game, about which more will be told tomorrow, originated in the very family that later became Schmoigerman.

2) The family name at the time of expulsion from Spain was de Menubal, which as you can see is derived from the word "menuval". The family was expelled from Spain 100 years before the Inquisition ever began, for reasons that we will share with you in future posts.

Researchers believe the first Schmoigerman ancestor to reach Spain was a butcher who sold "nevela," or carrion, meat that died of natural causes which of course is not kosher. Apparently because of the prices he charged, the surname was not Nebela but the more refined de Menubal, for it was as if the butcher himself was one and the same as his meat. The surname is a testimony to the nature of the family even from the days of churban bayis sheini, which as der Admou"r cries "iz der antziger binyon I haven't claimed yet fin der insurance!" Yes, der Admou"r possesses a title deed and insurance policy on the second beis hamikdosh, and he explained how he came to possess this document and how it came to be that the property was registered in his ancestor's name!

3) The ancestors of der Admou"r married within the family, with one noble exception. It was that exception whose surname became a part of the Yiddish mikveh vernacular to this very day.

4) The family name became Schmoigerman in Hungary in 1768, when Hoishe Menuvalcso, who bore the Hungarian variant of the de Menubal surname, was branded "shoiteh, menuval, vegas ruach" on one of the first pashkvilkelach issued by the "Adas Charydim Nagyszar" of Nagyszar, Hungary. Apparently this name had something to do with the manner in which Menuvalcso manufactured and sold kokosh cake that contained wood chips, animal waste and other noxious refuse. That pashkvilke was the first printed by my own ancestor, and this is how we bear the surname Pashkvilkemacher rather than Nagyszarvary or a similar Hungarian surname.

5) The Admour's zaide escaped Nagyszar and was not a kapo as was believed. Instead, he was a British double agent who ran a black market, and had his own currency in Mea Shearim, which was a precursor to the food stamp. However, unlike Reb Amram Bloy who also ran a voucher system, the Admou'r's zaide Reb Groinem Schmoigerman sold his vouchers for "tzioinish gelt" which he then converted into pounds sterling. He served as a well known moneychanger, and was known for issuing his own "lira, franken, shekel, dolar, funt" in denominations not produced by the mint or central bank of the issuing entity.

6) The Admou"r was adopted by a secular couple in Canada for a short while when his mother feigned insanity and had herself committed to Creedmoor in order to escape a jail sentence for assisting her husband with several botched burglaries. He ran away from his adoptive parents after six months, and joined his mother, who by then had forged a title deed to her room and two adjacent rooms, in Creedmoor. Rebbetzin Shprintze-Cholerye Schmoigerman was therefore the first Creedmoorer Rebbetzin even if her son and not her husband (an amateur chazzan known as Der Zinger fin Sing-Sing) became Admou"r.

More details on this noble and exalted lineage coming tomorrow, motzash and Sunday as we relate the distinguished history of a family which dedicated itself to gezel, mirmo, machloikes and geneivas daas even as far back as churban bayis sheini!

Cholerye Cleans Creedmoor - Part 1, Klara, Queen of Gownolec

BS"D

Clara, or more correctly Klara, Kosinska, was born and grew up in a little village called Gownolec, located about thirty kilometers from Cracow. To this day, Gownolec remains as forlorn and backward as it had been going back to the very days of its establishment by Count Gowniski, a renegade reprobate who basically invited the least favored peasants in Poland to work the land as his slaves.

A forerunner of Creedmoor, the Count would demand 125% of all crops raised in Gownolec as tribute from each peasant, and when this of course could not be paid, he would throw at least one family member into a dungeon where the debtor was compelled to work day and night making defective horseshoes that the Count would sell at a very high profit. When the horse wearing a "Gowno" horseshoe would break a leg, the Count would volunteer to slaughter and dispose of the steed, promising and never delivering a new mount in his place. That in turn often forced the customer into debt, and into residence at Gownolec, where the count had several enterprising ways of making his victims think they were working off their debts. Of course, all the Gownolec residents were doing was providing the Count with free indentured labor.

It was said that Klara was actually a descendant of this Count and not of the simple Gownolec peasants. Even during Communist times she ran several scams which in essence enslaved her neighbors, and she was always protected by the bribes she was able to give to the Communist authorities.

However, Gownolec was a tiny town, and she searched for greater opportunities. As soon as Communism fell, she knew she had to make her way to America, where so many of her sisters now worked as cleaning ladies for the despised Jews whom they had persecuted for generations. And many of these cleaning ladies actually prospered, some by true hard work and the occasional rogue by dint of theft of jewelry, silver and other valuables from their often prosperous employers.

Klara arrived in Brooklyn, and quickly joined the latter cohort. She claimed she was ready to undertake any task, even at the last moment before Shabbos and Yom Tov. And she did work hard, leaving the home spotless - and devoid of quite a few bechers, lechters and other valuables. As she chose only the most prosperous employers, the defalcations were often not noticed for weeks, and since she never returned or gave her proper name to any given employer, little could be done to prosecute her. Since these sophisticated balabustes had insured their silver, and Klara knew better than to steal heirlooms, they were hardly inclined to seek prosecution or even try to discover who had stolen their silver. At best, Klara's victims obtained required police reports for the sake of legitimate insurance collection and never bothered following up with the police as even had they not received their insurance, the loss meant little to them.

Klara succeeded in using her ill gotten gains to open a beauty salon and Polish restaurant in Brooklyn, which she staffed with fellow Gownolec immigrants and ran in Old Gownolec fashion. The enterprises succeeded, but she would simply fire each new employee a day before pay was due and then lend them money at 140% annual interest. Unable to pay, they would be rehired without salary to repay the debt.

However, she knew that America was not Poland. Moreover, Klara realized that one of the homes she had cleaned and relieved of over twenty thousand dollars worth of jewelry belonged to a woman whose husband had immense political contacts. Therefore, she knew she had to lay low for a while.

Being too ambitious and avaricious to ever stop earning money in Count Gowniski fashion, she soon found out about the one and only Admou"r meCreedmoor and decided that she had to convert to Judaism under his auspices. After all, no one, Jewish or gentile, except perhaps Bernard Madoff or Sholam Weiss, embodied the spirit of Gownolec and its founder more than the great Admou"r.

(NB: For those who recognize the word Gowno/Gowniski/Gownolec as being similar to its Russian cognate, and therefore scatological in meaning, it should be noted that researchers are unsure as to whether the Count was given the name Gowniski in recognition of the quality of his horseshoes, or whether the word entered the language because of the nature of the Count and his enterprises. This is similar to the debate surrounding the theory of the origin of the word Dreck as being a mispronunciation of the surname of Fat Ralphie, ne Rafael, Dweck, a reprobate Syrian Jewish fence and dealer in shoddy merchandise amidst the mostly Ashkenazi community in the Lower East Side of old).