From Soroka,
one family and a world.
Permeated by tragedy, separated by distance and time, the Gershenzon line spread outward from one Bessarabian town to five continents. This page marks our place in the branch that remembers.
Research by Daniel Gershenzon
Permeated by tragedy, separated by distance and time the origins of our ancestors are often obscured or lost entirely.
The aim of this project is to try and connect to a branch of our history, and to mark our place in it.
A lineage across three centuries.
From Gershko of Soroka to the generations scattered today across Bessarabia, Ukraine, Israel, the Americas and beyond. Dates in brackets are placeholders and can be replaced with family memory as new records arrive.
Gershko Gershenzon is born in Soroka
On the banks of the Dniester, in a town between empires, the earliest known ancestor of this tree is born. Nearly every branch of the Gershenzon family we have traced so far seems to lead back to him.
First generation, Leyba, Abram, Berko, Shmuil
Gershko's four sons come of age as Bessarabia passes from Ottoman to Russian hands. The family begins to spread along the Dniester, Ataki, Ocnița, Movilău.
◇ Placeholder detail · help us verifyBessarabia annexed by the Russian Empire
The region where the family has taken root is redrawn on the map. A new Pale of Settlement is formed; our ancestors live, marry and register births inside it for the next century.
Gershko dies; the tree now has hundreds of branches
Across four sons, dozens of grandchildren, and a growing diaspora, Gershko's line continues. By the middle of the 19th century, Gershenzons are documented in Ataki, Ocnița, Edineț and beyond.
Pogroms and the first great migration
In the decades following the 1881 pogroms, branches of the family leave for New York, Buenos Aires, Ottoman Palestine and Paris. Records from this era form the gaps we are still trying to close.
◇ Seeking family testimony for this eraThe tragedy, Transnistria and the Shoah
Whole branches of the tree are cut. Ataki, Ocnița, Edineț, Soroka, names that appear again and again on these pages, are also names on the lists of those who did not return. This page exists, in part, in their memory.
A scattered family finds new soil
Survivors and later generations settle across four continents. The Gershenzon surname takes on a dozen spellings, Gershenson, Gerschensohn, Gerszenzon, Hershenzon, each one a fingerprint of the route taken.
Project Gershenzon
Research by Daniel Gershenzon has already connected hundreds of descendants across the wider tree. The work now is to fill the missing pieces and find our connections, to the tree, and to each other.
One root, many rivers.
This map stays close to the first spread of the family, from Soroka along the Dniester to Ataki and Ocnița, then inland through Edineț, Bălți and Chișinău. Hover each branch to follow the corridor the text describes.
Every name we find is a light in a window we thought was dark.
The first five generations.
A glimpse of the dynasty tree, drawn directly from the family-tree research. From Gershko (1755–1828), four sons, their wives, and the beginning of the scatter.
Help us fill
the missing pieces.
If your family carries a version of the Gershenzon name, or a memory of Soroka, Ataki, Ocnița, or a grandmother who whispered a Yiddish word at the stove, we would like to meet you.
