Khana Reizel

She was David’s wife and Koppel’s mother. The list of families who moved from Vitebsk to Novy Zlatopol, of 1850 and 1852, records her as Chana, aged 32, with no father’s name. The 1858 census records her as “Хана Залкова”, Khana daughter of Zalka, aged 38. Both ages put her birth around 1820. She died in 1885 in Andreyevka, then in Taurida province.

That patronymic is the only documented fact about her family of origin. Zalka is a common form of Zalman.

What Freedman proposes, and how it changed. Chaim Freedman identifies her as Khana Reizel Komisaruk, of the Rassein family (now Raseiniai, Lithuania) whose descent from the Vilna Gaon he considers proven. In Eliyahu’s Branches (1997) and in the February 2020 report he made her a daughter of Dov-Ber (Berel), whom he earlier called Velvel, and of Ester, a granddaughter of the Gaon: and therefore a sister of Rabbi Shlomo-Zalmen Komisaruk. That is the version this site’s tree shows, and the one many published trees give, which also have her born in Rassein. In October 2020, with the full 1858 census in hand, Freedman himself ruled that version out: had she been Berel’s daughter, she would appear as “Berelova” and not “Zalkova”. He then proposed that she was Shlomo-Zalmen’s daughter, and presented it as a theory.

No known document names her parents or links her to the Komisaruks. So the ancestry this tree draws, and with it the link to the Gaon, remains a hypothesis, and the version the tree shows is contradicted by the census. The whole question, with what supports it, what is missing and what could settle it, is in the open questions.

The Vilna Gaon (1720–1797) was one of the most important rabbinic figures in Jewish history. Freedman considers it proven, including by genetic testing, that the Komisaruk branch descends from him. What remains open is whether David’s wife belongs to that branch.