She was born into a noble family and was a devout Eastern Orthodox Christian. She did not speak Hebrew fluently, and so could not enjoy her famous husband's works.
Melania Karlovna was born in 1879 in Grodno (then in tsarist Russia, now Belarus) into a noble family. Her ancestry was mixed - Polish, German, and Ukrainian - and her family was full of high-ranking officials. One of her relatives was the Master of the Horse to Tsar Nicholas II; among her other relatives were high-ranking officers and military commanders.
Her command of German, alongside other languages, was probably why she studied at the University of Heidelberg. She also needed to escape the Russians, who were persecuting her for being an anarchist who had already been imprisoned by the tsar.
In Germany, she met a Jewish medical student. They fell in love and married, and their daughter Isolde was born there. In 1931, the family immigrated to the Land of Israel and settled in a modest apartment in Tel Aviv. The well-known, long-established physician lost the position of Rehovot's colony doctor because he had married a Christian woman.
Melania struggled to adapt to the Zionist idea. Her religious devotion grew stronger, and a few years later she asked to live in seclusion at a convent in Jerusalem. Eventually, she moved with her daughter into the Greek Patriarch's residence, near the Monastery of San Simon in Jerusalem. Her husband, the physician, remained in Tel Aviv and traveled to Jerusalem on weekends to visit them. In time, the physician fell ill and grew weak. When it became clear that he had leukemia, he moved in with his wife and daughter at the Greek Patriarch's residence in Jerusalem.
The Struggle over Melania's Conversion
For years, various rabbis tried to persuade the physician to have his wife convert to Judaism, among them Rabbi Herzog, Israel's chief rabbi, and Rabbi Shlomo Goren, but all their requests were rejected. The physician's answer was clear: A person is a person is a person, and it makes no difference whether they are Jewish, Christian, or Muslim.
One of the moving Israeli poems written by that Jewish physician, the husband of Melania, a Christian woman, is one of Israel's most beloved classics:
Laugh, laugh at dreams,
It is I, the dreaming one, who speaks.
Laugh, for I believe in humanity,
For I still believe in you.
For my soul still yearns for freedom,
I have not sold it to the golden calf,
For I still believe in humanity,
And in its spirit, a bold spirit.
Yes, our physician is the poet Shaul Tchernichovsky, whose portrait appears on the 50-shekel banknote. When the Bank of Israel decided which figures would appear on the banknotes, and after the government approved the decision, Dr. Hagai Ben-Artzi voiced his objection to the figure of a poet married to a non-Jewish woman, writing:
“And I cry out: How was this abomination committed in Israel? How did your hand not tremble, Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, when you approved this terrible and shocking recommendation?... Now that this abomination has been committed, we have no choice but to act against it on the ground. Every one of us can refuse to accept Tchernichovsky banknotes.”
Shaul Tchernichovsky died of cancer at the age of 68, at the Greek Patriarch's residence, where his wife and daughter lived. His last words expressed his fear for his reputation because of his marriage to a Christian woman: “So, to die in a monastery!”
There was concern that the people of Jerusalem would refuse to bury him as a Jew, so his body was secretly taken from the Greek Patriarch's residence and smuggled to Tel Aviv, where he was buried in the cemetery on Trumpeldor Street.
His daughter Isolde converted to Judaism and married the engineer Avraham Wilensky.
After her husband died, Melania moved into her daughter's home in Haifa. Toward the end of her life, she fell ill, and when the doctors predicted that she would live no more than two more years, Melania decided to make the most of the time she had left and set off to travel the world. She lived to an advanced age and died in 1971, at the age of 92, and was buried in the Greek Orthodox section of the cemetery complex in Haifa.
Although she lived in the country for forty years, Melania did not know Hebrew and so could not enjoy her husband's works.
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