by Johanna Ginsberg
NJJN Staff Writer

August 4, 2009

It was an ingathering of Gelernters: the Gelernters of Toronto and Israel, of Mobile, Ala.; and London, England; of West Orange and Ledgewood.

All converged July 30-Aug. 2 on the Newark Liberty International Airport Marriott Hotel for a 25th anniversary of their first reunion, a June 30-July 2, 1984, affair held in the Catskills that was featured in an article in the Jewish News.

This year’s reunion did not attract the more than 200 family members from many different countries who came to the first reunion; still, about 100 people attended this time around, and the reunion inspired the family to create a Gelernter page on Facebook, designed to attract a younger generation.

And while the family has been gathering every three years or so, their sense of history goes back much further: Members can trace their roots back 19 generations, to the 1500s, when Zachariah Mendel lived in Poland and had the name Gelernter (“learned”) bestowed upon him.

Most families, particularly Ashkenazi Jews, are happy to trace their generations back 100 years or so, according to historian and genealogist Yitzchak Kerem, who researched the Gelernters.

“For Ashkenazim, you would only be able to trace them maybe as early as the beginning of the 19th century through Russian records and then to the present. Very rarely do you find Ashkenazi families that go back to the 18th century, and for sure not to the 16th century,” said Kerem.

Because the Gelernters were a prominent family, with a line of rabbis that continues until today, they were comparatively easy to trace, he said.

The family can also claim yichus — pedigree — beyond their own name: Prominent rabbinic families married each other, and the Gelernters count marriages to eminent rabbinic families named Horowitz, Heller, and Katzenellenbogen, said to be descendants of Rashi, the renowned talmudic commentator of the Middle Ages.

Kerem is cautious about the claim, but doesn’t discount it. “Very few families can actually prove that they are direct descendents of Rashi,” he said. Knowing that members of rabbinical families married each other, he said, can lead to the conclusion that certain families are somewhere on the Rashi family tree, although it can’t be directly demonstrated.

Family provenance aside, there was a striking resemblance among reunion attendees, particularly in the shoulders and shape of the head. Many of the Gelernter family members also seem to find themselves in the helping fields — in addition to rabbis, they are social workers and educators and health-care professionals. (No Gelernter rabbis attended this year’s reunion.)

Just as they did 25 years ago, reunion attendees came with photographs of unidentified people and places hoping to fill in the gaps.

Alan Simons of Toronto recalled bringing a photo of his great-grandfather’s brother to a previous reunion; someone picked up the photo, and identified an uncle he hadn’t seen in perhaps 70 years.

Simons, who was one of six people who helped organize the weekend’s reunion, summed up his reason for coming in one word: “Roots.”

All the participants had their own reasons for attending; all seemed eager to put together the puzzle of family.

Selma Bukstein of Laguna Woods, Calif., and Ava Reinfeld of West Orange, who share a New Jersey branch of the family, swapped shared stories, including memories of the monthly Gelernter Family Circle meetings that were held through the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s in Newark and East Orange.

“There were 17 girls and three boys, and we were cousins but we were like sisters. All the boys were named George or Gershon. We got together for dinner and then we talked, and usually it was politics,” recalled Bukstein.

Reinfeld, one of the organizers, can’t help notice the family resemblance in people she’s never met — one woman at a previous reunion resembled so closely a favorite deceased aunt that Reinfeld cried the first time she saw the woman.

Arnold Reisman of Shaker Heights, Ohio, was the only reunion attendee who could claim Gelernters on two sides of his family — and both without being a Gelernter himself. His two aunts married two Gelernter brothers, and his wife, Ellen, is also a Gelernter.

Nena Schultz of Ledgewood brought her children, 12-year-old Jacob and eight-year-old Hannah. “They are old enough to remember and to understand,” said Schultz. “And they like the concept that our family spans the globe and they get to meet people related to them who live on the other side of the world.”

And so the weekend sailed on, filled with reminiscences and photographs, a family dinner, and a new set of memories to share with Gelernters around the world.

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