Sources

State Archive of Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine. Registers of the Mariupol synagogue, year 1899.

Fond 211 of that archive holds specifically the records of the Mariupol synagogue, Mariupol district, Ekaterinoslav province.

It is the birth record of Meyer —later Marcos Smud—, and it names his father, Falik, and his grandfather, Kopel. Together with the Paraná gravestone, it is the document that, a century later, made it possible to join the Russian branch of the family to the Argentine one.

Census of the Jewish colony of Novy Zlatopol, taken on 26 May 1858. The family is listed as household 47/92, headed by David Falikov Zmud.

The sheet has two pages: on the left the males, with the age they had at the previous revision (1850) and the one they have in 1858; on the right the females. Household 47/92 lists David, aged 40 (32 in 1850); his sons Kopel, 20, Falko, 18, and Leyzer, 7; and Movsha, Kopel’s son, aged 2.

On the females’ page, which records each woman with her father’s name, it reads:

Давида жена Хана Залкова — 38

Копеля жена Дворка Абова — 20

That is: “David’s wife, Khana, daughter of Zalka”, and “Kopel’s wife, Dvorka, daughter of Aba”. They are the only parentage data there is for either woman. Khana’s is at the centre of the question about her ancestry: “Zalkova” is not compatible with her being the daughter of a Berel or a Velvel, as several trees propose.

It preserves Marcos’s Hebrew name —Meir Smud— and his father’s, Folke. It is the Argentine document that matches the Russian birth record, name for name.

It lists Malke or Molke Noel de Smud, Russian national, aged 30, with Alex aged 7, Meyer aged 5 and Eide aged 6 months. The surname was written “Smud or Smod”.

The world’s leading Jewish genealogy database. It brings together civil and religious records, censuses, passenger lists and gravestones from Eastern Europe. A search for the surname Zhmud returns hundreds of records from Ukraine, Latvia and Lithuania.

A warning for anyone searching: in Lithuania, “Zhmud” was a very common surname and simply meant “the Samogitian”. Most of those Lithuanian records are not this family. Ours appears as Zmud in the 1858 census and is found in Ludza and the Ekaterinoslav colonies.

A free collaborative family tree. The whole line in this document is entered there, with individual profiles.

It is an open tree that anyone can edit, and each profile is as good as its sources. Those with documents attached are as reliable as those documents; those with none should be treated with caution.

An Australian genealogist who, over decades, reconstructed the history of the Komisaruk and Zhmood families in the Jewish agricultural colonies of southern Ukraine.

It is the work that documented Felix’s siblings and the Vilna Gaon’s descendants in the Komisaruk branch, and without which this reconstruction would not have been possible. It records that Koppel had a son named Yerakhmiel Falik: from Berdyansk, a soldier and a butcher.

His book Eliyahu’s Branches: The Descendants of the Vilna Gaon and His Family (Avotaynu, 1997) reconstructs the descendants of Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman. It is the reference that supports the line going up from Khana Reizel Komisaruk, through her mother, to the Gaon, and also the other ancestries that come in through the women: the paternal Komisaruk line, the Serdeks and the Yovels. In FamilySearch’s collaborative tree the book appears attached only to the profile of Yehuda Leib, the Gaon’s son, but the lines are the ones Freedman reconstructed. That the Khana Reizel Komisaruk of that tree is David Zmud’s wife is Freedman’s own proposal, with no document naming her parents.

That does not turn them into civil records. It is a published, reviewed genealogy, which is a different —and weaker— kind of support than an archival document.

The descendant report of the Komisaruk family that Chaim Freedman updated in February 2020 to replace the material in his book Eliyahu’s Branches (1997). It includes the Zhmood branch from David Zmud onwards, with notes stating where each item comes from.

The report does more than repeat the book. It adds documents Freedman found later in Lithuanian and Ukrainian archives, and it corrects relationships he gave in 1997: the father of Shlomo-Zalmen Komisaruk, for instance, listed in the book as Velvel, appears here as Berel (Dov-Ber), married to Ester, which is how nineteenth-century records name him. It is one of the central sources of this genealogy. It reconstructs the colony families and the links between branches, gathers the traditions their descendants kept, gives the historical context and, for the Komisaruk branch, adds genetic evidence. Throughout the text, Freedman keeps apart what he considers established and what he infers.

The Vilna Gaon. On descent from the Gaon, the report makes it possible to separate two questions.

The first concerns the Komisaruk branch. Freedman writes that genetic testing proved the Komisaruk family’s descent from the Gaon: he compared his DNA with that of other branches regarded as descendants of the Gaon and found that they matched his and also matched each other. For him that descent is proven, and the report sets out the evidence.

The second is how the Zhmoods come into that branch, and there the support is of a different kind. It depends on Khana-Reizel, David Zmud’s wife, being the daughter of Dov-Ber Komisaruk and Ester, a granddaughter of the Gaon. In a 2007 analysis of the Grinblat family, included in the same report, Freedman explains that according to oral tradition the Grinblat, Zmood and Komisaruk families were related and came from a common ancestor. He recalls that in Eliyahu’s Branches and in an earlier work he had proposed that Shlomo-Zalmen Komisaruk, Khana-Reizel Zmood and a sister married to Aron-Moshe Grinblat were siblings, children of Dov-Ber and Ester. And he adds that, if his analysis of the Salant lists is valid, that sister would be Belka. The same text notes that Lithuanian lists before 1858 do not record women’s patronymics, so Belka’s parentage cannot be proven from those records. For Khana-Reizel, the report cites no document naming her parents.

In short, Freedman firmly holds that the Komisaruk branch descends from the Gaon. Whether the Zhmood branch belongs to that line depends on a reconstruction that he himself puts forward as a proposal and, in his later analysis, in conditional terms. That is why, in this research, the Zhmoods’ descent from the Gaon is a serious genealogical hypothesis, supported by Freedman, but not a parentage proven by documents.

The Zhmood family itself, by contrast, is well documented. This research found the Ukrainian revision lists of 1853 and 1858. The 1853 list has David Zhmuyd, aged 34; Khana, his wife, 32; and David’s sons Shevel, 14, and Falko, 12. The 1858 list has David Zmud, 40; Khana, 38; his sons Kopel, 20, Falko, 18, and Leyzer, 7; and Movsh, Kopel’s son, 2. The surname changes from one document to another, depending on the year and on who wrote it down: Zhmuyd in 1853, Zmud in 1858, Zhmud or Zhmuydya in other records. The ages fit very closely with the birth years Freedman gives: 1818 for David, 1820 for Khana-Reizel and 1839 for Koppel. Freedman also notes that in the 1850/1852 list of settlers Koppel was mistakenly recorded as “Shevel”; in the 1853 list, David’s fourteen-year-old son is indeed named Shevel, at Koppel’s age. These lists strengthen the reconstruction of the Zhmood family and the sequence David, Khana, Koppel. They say nothing, however, about Khana’s parents, which is the link that remains open.

The Argentine family said for generations that the Smuds/Zhmuds descended from a rabbi or a rabbinic family. It is not in what Rubén wrote in 1996: it is oral tradition, not proof, and it does not name the Gaon. It is recorded here because it partly matches the framework that later appears in Freedman’s work.

The question remains open. It could be settled by a document naming Khana-Reizel’s parents or, eventually, by a genetic comparison between descendants of the Zhmood branch and the branches Freedman used as controls.

About Felix, the report confirms what the documents show: a butcher, a burgher of Berdyansk, “Falik Kopelov Zhmud” in his son’s birth record, the name Yerakhmiel Falik in a list of subscribers, and his wife, Ester Malka, daughter of Meir.

What it says about Felix’s family is wrong, and it is the same mistake repeated by many family trees published online:

• Felix and Malke’s children were Alejandro, Marcos —Meyer— and Aida, the three who travelled with Malke in 1904. The report instead gives him Moshe (Misha) and Katya, with no date, place or source, and leaves Alejandro out. Moshe may be Alejandro and Katya may be Aida —the genders match—, remembered under other names by a relative who was asked; this is a hypothesis of this research, not a fact.
• Aida is Felix’s daughter. The report makes her the daughter of an Avraham Zhmood/Smud, a son of Koppel, about whom it gives no data at all; that Avraham appears in no other source.
• Marcos was not born “in Berdyansk, USSR” but in Mariupol, as his birth record says —the very record the report cites. In 1899, besides, the USSR did not exist.
• Felix was not born in Andreyevka —the family only moved there in the 1870s— and did not die in Mariupol: he emigrated to Argentina in 1905 and died there around 1909.

One item remains open: the report says Felix served in the cavalry, distinguished himself enough to become a junior officer —something very rare for a Jew— and, on leaving the army, turned down the post of starosta of a town. That account appears only in this report and carries no source note, but it is not ruled out.

Freedman was reconstructing the history of the colony families and had no way of knowing that this branch had ended up on the other side of the world. These items almost certainly reached him through the oral tradition of other branches, with no documents to check them against. Felix’s story, with its documents and with what the family preserved, is in his entry and in the chapter about him.

Freedman’s own study of October 2020 also revises the parentage of Khana Reizel and Dvorka that this report still gives.

A study by Chaim Freedman of the marriages among the Komisaruk, Zmood, Yovel, Grinblat and Pogorelske families in the Jewish agricultural colonies of southern Ukraine, and of the family tradition that all of them descended from a common ancestor.

It transcribes household 47 of Novy Zlatopol in the 1852 list of colonists and in the 1858 census, and uses the patronymics recorded in that census to revise relationships that had been taken for granted until then.

Written by Rubén —Alejandro’s son, Felix’s grandson— from what Alejandro, Aida and a cousin told him.

It is the source of the exact arrival date, the name of the ship, the port of departure, the ports of call, the address of the tenement house, the story of the desertion, the Sephardic origin of the Noel family and the Baltic origin of the Smuds.

It predates Eliyahu’s Branches (1997), Chaim Freedman’s book, and has no connection with his work: it preserves a tradition of the Argentine family’s own. Among other things, it speaks of an Ashkenazi Jewish origin in “Lithuania, near Riga”, the move to Ukraine, the family in Berdyansk, Felix in the Russian army and as a butcher, relatives who also emigrated to Australia, and the first generation in Argentina.

Almost everything Rubén wrote from memory in 1996 was later confirmed by documents no one could consult at the time. It is the starting point of this whole research and, for now, the only source of which we have a complete copy.

They propose three generations above Falk: Alexander Zhmuydya, born around 1778; Yehuda Zhmuydya, around 1750; and Leizer Zhmuydya, around 1725 in Lithuania.

Those three generations have no supporting document yet. They are a reconstruction, not a finding.

The database where researchers upload their own family trees. It is not a document: it is what each of them reconstructed, with the author’s name and the date of the last update beside every entry. It is useful for seeing who claims what, and for finding others researching the same family.

Searching the forms of the surname brings up several trees with this line. Three matter:

Chaim Freedman. His file, updated in March 2017, has the Ludza family under a form of the surname that is not in his 2020 report: Zhmuydya. And it already has, in 2017, the household the census would later confirm: “Aba (Abel ?) Zhmuydya”, born 1802, son of Aleksander Zhmuydya and Dvorka, married to Khana, with two daughters, “Khaska” (1821), married to Dov Ber (Berko) Lozhov, and “Dofka” (1838). That Dofka of 1838 is the Dvorka the 1858 census records aged 20, daughter of Aba, married to Koppel: the same person his February 2020 report calls Deverah Yovel.

The same file gives the generations before Falk with death years: Aleksander Zhmuydya (1778–1834), son of Yehudah (Idel) Zhmuydya and Eva; and Falk Zhmuydya (1797–1840), married to Ester, Aba’s brother. The dates have the shape of those that come from revision lists, but the tree does not say which document each comes from.

Lior Gradstein, updated in October 2020, and other trees repeat the earlier version: David Zmood (1818–1880) married to “Chanah Reizel Komisaruk”, and Hinda Anna, daughter of Koppel and “Devorah Yovel”.

Gabriel Shaqued and John David Mansfield add details that match neither the documents nor each other: David born in 1800 and married in 1829, Fulik —Felix— dying in 1930, Alexander (Manyik) dying in 1940, a wife called Reizel for Fulik.

None of this proves anything on its own. It is worth having as a pointer to where to look, and as a record of who proposed what.

The document that would settle the question of the oldest generations exists and has been located: an 1816 census of Ludza, in which Falk would be about nineteen and would appear identified by his father’s name.

Until that file is consulted, everything before Falk remains open.