Monsohn Family of Jerusalem

Abraham-Leib ben Yitshak Monsohn (Hebrew: ר' אברהם-לייב ב' יצחק מאנזאהן), known as “Avrom-Leib Shames” (1804-1870),^[1] was a member of the first Ashkenazi prayer quorum in the Old Yishuv community of Jerusalem at the beginning of the nineteenth century.^[2] He was born in Mogilev and immigrated to Jerusalem in 1832 with other students of the Vilna Gaon.^[3] His first wife was Zelda;^[4] he later married Dahde, believed to have been of the Maghrebim or North African Jewish community of Hebron.^[5] Abraham-Leib was the first beadle and caretaker (shamash) of the Menachem Zion and Hurva synagogues in the Old City of Jerusalem,^[6] and of Rachel's Tomb on the outskirts of Bethlehem.^[7] He also was an aid to community leader Shlomo Zalman Zoref and accompanied him to Constantinople to obtain the sultan's permission to build the Hurva synagogue.^[8] Abraham-Leib’s son, Yoel Yosef Shimon Monsohn (Jerusalem, c.1843-c.1907),^[9] called “Shimen Shames,”^[10][11] later assumed the communal tasks his father had performed,^[12] by commission of Sir Moses Montefiore.^[13] He was in contact with communal leaders of the time such as Yosef Yoel Rivlin.^[14] Shimen Shames was married to Gittel (née Yofe),^[15][16] whose family migrated to Hebron with fellow members of the Chabad hasidic movement in Shklov in the 1820s.^[17]

Shimen Shames’ son, Abraham-Leib II (Jerusalem, c.1871-1930),^[13] together with his brother Moshe-Mordechai (Jerusalem, c.1870-1940), were sent to Frankfurt in 1890 to study lithographic printing.^[18] Upon returning to Jerusalem with a hand press, they established the A.L. Monsohn Lithography in the Old City of Jerusalem, in the courtyard opposite what is today the Isaac Kaplan Old Yishuv Court Museum (Hebrew: מוזיאון חצר היישוב הישן), where Abraham-Leib resided with his wife Rachel-Leah Miriam, a descendant of the Old Yishuv Honig family.^[19] It produced about 300 color prints per day, the only color printing done at the time in Jerusalem. The press closed in 1992. The early generations of the Jerusalem Monsohn's are buried in the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives. Most of their descendants still reside in Israel. Members of the family still possess the secret key to Rachel's Tomb commissioned by Sir Moses Montefiore.^[20] Rabbi Menachem Mendel Monsohn (Jerusalem, 1895; New York, 1953), a son of Abraham-Leib II, immigrated to the United States in 1924 and published several editions of Mi-Peninei Ha-Rambam: Bi’ur ‘al ha-Torah, a compendium of Maimonides’ commentaries on the Pentateuch, arranged by the compiler in order of the Torah chapters, in New York in the 1930s.

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