יאָקען
The Yoken Family · A Record · 1868 – 1955
From Belinitz to Chavenson Street
The story of Yerucham and Khasya Raisa of Byalynichy, Belarus, and of their seven children, who emigrated to Fall River, Massachusetts between about 1890 and 1907.
Chapter One
A town called Belinitz
The family pronounced it Beh-LIN-itz. On Russian maps it was Belynichi; today it is Byalynichy, Belarus — a market town twenty-six miles northwest of Mogilev. In 1900, about a thousand of its two thousand residents were Jewish: bakers, peddlers, tailors, two physicians named Frumkin and Rokhlin, and families named Goldman, Lapidus, Shapiro, Revzin, and Estrin.
One of those families belonged to Yerucham. He carried a compound name, as many men did, and his children later gave American clerks different parts of it when asked their father's name — Yerucham, Isaac, Charles, Boris, Harry. All the same man — and his daughters’ gravestones give the full form: Yerucham Yitzchak. He was a rabbi and a teacher — his granddaughter wrote it down, years later, in the family Bible: "My maternal grandfather was a rabbi, a teacher." In America, the children came to speak of their parents simply as Harry and Jessie. His wife was Khasya Raisa Gurevich — "Hasheh" to her family, "Rose" to some of her children. Her father was a grain merchant, and she had two brothers, Shmeril and Chaim; the family remembered that Shmeril was killed and Chaim lived. Between about 1868 and 1882 she and Yerucham had seven children in Belinitz: Peshe, Abram, Dvoyra, Yoel, Tsira, Shmarya, and Freyda.
Yerucham died around 1885, and Khasya Raisa around 1887. Their children — the eldest around twenty, the youngest about five — emigrated over the following two decades. This page follows where they went.
Chapter Two
Seven crossings
They did not leave together. Over about seventeen years, the siblings emigrated one or two at a time — rail to a Baltic or German port, steamship to New York or Boston, then on to Fall River, where the earlier arrivals helped the later ones get settled. Historians call this chain migration; for this family it meant that by 1907 all seven siblings lived in the same city.
Peshe — "Bessie" פּעשע
Married Aaron Chavenson in Russia; their son David was born in Fall River in 1891, which places them there earlier than any of her siblings. They raised seven children, the eldest born in Russia before the crossing. Bessie died in 1931. The Chavensons later gave their name to a Fall River street.
Abram — "Abraham"
Arrived about 1891 and started as a peddler. Filed his first citizenship papers in 1893, bought property on Second Street in 1897, married Lillie in 1898, and ran a grocery at 899 Second Street for decades. Four children. The only known photograph of him — with all four of them, about 1911 — appears in Chapter Four.
Freyda — "Fannie" פרידא
Came as a girl. The family Bible remembers the crossing: she "escaped from Russia as a child with sister Celia, brother Sam & cousin Wm. Cohen," landing at Castle Garden in New York. In April 1900 she married the baker Jacob Molasky. Her marriage record — "Fanny, daughter of Boris and Chase Gurevitz" — is the document that preserved her mother's full name. Her family later settled in Rhode Island. She died in 1948.
Tsira — "Celia" צירא
Born in September 1874; her gravestone records her birthday in the Hebrew calendar. She crossed as a girl in the same party as Fannie and Sam. Married Morris Kane — originally Morris Cohen — a peddler from Poland. Seven children. She died in 1947.
Yoel — "Yale / Joseph" יואל
Worked as a baker at 250 Spring Street. Married Rebecca; their four children were born in Massachusetts and Connecticut. In the city directories his surname is spelled Yokin some years and Yoken others. In the 1920s the family moved to Brooklyn; Joseph died in New York in 1939 and is buried in Queens.
Shmarya — "Samuel" שמריה
Crossed at about fifteen. His 1905 citizenship petition states he was born in "Belinitz, Mohilif, Russia" — the document that confirmed the family's hometown. He signed it with an X; by 1918 he signed his name in full. A fruit peddler; five children. He died in 1932, not yet fifty.
Dvoyra — "Dora" דבֿורה
Stayed in Belarus the longest. She married Samuel Neiman and raised six children in Belinitz and the nearby village of Dashkovka. After her husband died, she emigrated in 1907 with all six children. Her branch of the family became the Newmans. She died in 1948.
Ages and years follow each person's own documents. As in most immigrant families, no two papers quite agree.
Chapter Three
How Иохин became Yoken
In Russia the family's name was written in Cyrillic — probably Iokhin, possibly Yurkin or Gorkin; the records that would settle it are in an archive in Minsk, and an inquiry has been sent. In America, clerks and census takers wrote the name down however it sounded to them. These spellings all appear in real documents:
By about 1905 the family had settled on Yoken. On their gravestones the name appears in Hebrew letters — יאָקען — matching the way it was pronounced. The earliest of the family stones — Sam’s, from 1932 — still spells it the old way: יאקין, Yokin. And in a 2010 oral history at Rutgers, Abraham’s grandson Richard recalled the tradition directly: the name had been “Yochen, with a guttural CH,” anglicized when the CH became a K.
A common myth, for the record: names were not changed at Ellis Island. Ship manifests were written at the port of departure, and immigrant families generally chose their own American spellings within a few years of arriving.
Chapter Four
Pushcarts, bread, and a street with the family's name
Fall River in 1900 was one of the largest textile cities in America, and it drew immigrants from many countries. The family lived first around 132 Flint Street, later 136 Haffards Street. Abraham went from pushcart to fruit stand to grocery. Joseph baked. Samuel sold fruit in the street for most of his working life. The brothers served as witnesses on each other's citizenship papers, and the deeds and court files show the family doing business together for fifty years.
The in-laws did well too: Aaron Chavenson, Bessie's husband, bought and sold enough Fall River real estate that the city still has a Chavenson Street. A grandson of Aaron and Bessie — the Bridgeport judge George Saden — later endowed a scholarship fund at Yale University named in part for his mother, Lillian Chavenson Saden.
Named for their grandparents
Ashkenazi Jewish families name children after relatives who have died. Across the seven households, the pattern is easy to see:
| Born | Child | Named for |
|---|---|---|
| ~1897 | Jessie Newman (Dora's daughter, born in Belarus) | Grandmother Khasya / "Hasheh" |
| ~1899 | Hattie Chavenson (Bessie's daughter) | |
| ~1903 | Esther Jessie Yoken (Abraham's daughter) | |
| 1917 | Jessie Yoken (Samuel's daughter) | |
| 1898 | Harry Eruchim Yoken (Abraham's son) | Grandfather Yerucham / "Harry" |
| 1898 | Harry Newman (Dora's son, born in Belinitz) | |
| 1908 | Harry Yoken (Joseph's son) | |
| 1914 | Harry Erwin Yoken (Samuel's son) |
Four Harrys and four girls named for Hasheh — a plain record that the grandparents in Belinitz were remembered.
Chapter Five
A wedding of cousins, and a trip to Europe
On July 9, 1919, in Newport, Rhode Island, Abraham's son Harry Eruchim Yoken married Bessie's daughter Hattie Chavenson — first cousins, both around twenty-one, each named for one of the grandparents. Cousin marriages were lawful and not unusual at the time. Their son Richard was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1920.
In August 1929, Hattie, young Richard, and one of the Yoken aunts sailed home from Cherbourg, France after a European trip, booked through the Burges Tourist Agency on Bedford Street. Twenty-two years after Dora's crossing, members of the family were making the same voyage in the other direction, as tourists.
Chapter Six
The stones speak
At Agudas Achim Cemetery in Fall River, the family's gravestones carry two languages: English for the city they lived in, Hebrew for the tradition they came from. The Hebrew lines, read a century later, confirmed the family tree. All seven siblings’ stones have now been located and read — six at Agudas Achim, and Joseph’s at Mount Judah Cemetery in Queens, New York. Six of the seven inscriptions name their father, and four give his name in full: Yerucham Yitzchak.
ר׳ אברהם בר׳ ירוחם
יאָקען
"Our dear father, an honored man, Reb Avraham son of Reb Yerucham, Yoken." Abraham died on April 6, 1955 — the 14th of Nisan, the day before Passover began.
Abraham Yoken · 1870 – 1955
צירא בת ר׳ ירוחם יאָקען
קײן
"Our dear mother, Tsira daughter of Reb Yerucham Yoken — Kane." Celia's stone gives her birthday in the Hebrew calendar — Tishrei 5635, September 1874 — and the Hebrew date turned out to be more accurate than the English one carved beside it. Beside her, Morris’s own line reads “Avraham Moshe son of Reb Tzvi ha-Kohen” — the Kanes were Kohanim, the priestly line, which is how Cohen became their name. He died in December 1944, three years before Celia.
Celia (Tsira) Yoken Kane · 1874 – 1947
לאה בת ר׳ ישראל
יאָקען
"Our dear mother, an honored woman, Leah daughter of Reb Yisrael — Yoken." Lillian died May 11, 1954. Abraham died eleven months later. They are buried side by side.
Lillian (Leah) Yoken · ~1876 – 1954
פרידא בת ר׳ יצחק ירוחם
מאלאסקי
"Our dear mother, Freyda daughter of Reb Yitzchak Yerucham — Molasky." Fannie's stone carries her father's double name in a single line. She died December 5, 1948 (3 Kislev 5709); Jacob, beside her, lived to ninety and died on Simchat Torah, 1965 — his own line names his father, Mordechai Leib.
Fannie (Freyda) Yoken Molasky · ~1882 – 1948
[ ־־־ ] בת ר׳ ירוחם־יצחק׳ל
חאווענסאן
"An honored and dear woman… daughter of Reb Yerucham-Yitzchok’l — Chavenson." The line with her given name has weathered past reading, but her father’s double name — carved with its affectionate diminutive — is clear. Bessie died on the evening of November 10, 1931 (1 Kislev 5692), the first of the seven siblings to pass in America.
Bessie (Peshe) Yoken Chavenson · ~1868 – 1931
ר׳ שמריה ב״ר ירוחם
יאקין
"A dear and honored man, Reb Shmarya son of Reb Yerucham — Yokin." Sam died on Rosh Chodesh Nisan 5692 — April 7, 1932 — five months after his sister Bessie, and his stone preserves the family’s original American spelling, Yokin. His wife Tzipora — Celia Mintz — rests beside him.
Sam (Shmarya) Yoken · 1882 – 1932
דבורה ניומאן
ב״ר ירוחם יצחק
"Our dear mother, Devorah Newman, daughter of Reb Yerucham Yitzchak." Dora died on April 6, 1948 (26 Adar II 5708) — seven years to the day before her brother Abraham.
Dora (Devorah) Yoken Newman · 1875 – 1948
יואל ב״ר ירוחם יצחק
נפ׳ כ״ו תשרי ת״ש
"Here lies Yoel, son of Reb Yerucham Yitzchak — died 26 Tishrei 5700," October 9, 1939, exactly matching the English. The stone settles a small family mystery: "Yale," the name he carried alongside Joseph, was simply his Hebrew name, Yoel. His is the only one of the seven stones outside Fall River.
Joseph (Yoel, "Yale") Yoken · ~1874 – 1939
Chapter Seven
Lillian
Lillian — Leah — married Abraham in 1898 and had four children in seven years. In 1910 the couple separated; she sued Abraham for support, and a court found she was living apart from him "for justifiable cause." In 1912, on Abraham’s petition, she was declared mentally ill and committed to the state hospital at Taunton. The laws of that era let a husband commit a wife on very little evidence, and by the family’s account the evidence here was thin. Hospital records obtained by one of her grandsons decades later are said to show that she was coherent and normal when she arrived, and that her condition declined only during her first year inside.
The family portrait in Chapter Four was taken in just these years — about 1911. Abraham and the four children sit dressed for the photographer, and Lillian is not in the frame. Her absence from the only family photograph is itself part of her story.
What followed was the harshest custom of the time: the family observed mourning for her as though she had died, and the next generation grew up not knowing their grandmother was alive. Yet the record shows the door never fully closed. The 1921 city directory still lists "Yoken, Abraham (Lillian)" — husband and wife. She was home with Abraham and two of their sons at the 1930 census. Her niece, Jessie Newman, helped Abraham raise the children — and when Jessie married in 1922, Abraham covered much of the wedding, with Joseph’s bakery supplying it. Lillian returned to Taunton by 1935 and remained there until her death in 1954, at seventy-seven.
One personal memory of her survives, written down in 1988: her great-niece Jessie Molasky recalled being taken to visit her as a little girl, before the Taunton years — “Grandpa Yoken’s wife, who served tea and cookies. She was a beautiful lady.” Her gravestone stands beside Abraham’s and calls her a beloved mother and an honored woman. Whatever the full truth of 1912 — illness, injustice, or some of both — the family’s last word on her was honor, and this page records her the same way.
Chapter Eight
The ones who stayed
Belinitz remained a Jewish town for a generation after the family left. In 1939 about 780 Jews lived there. Germany occupied the town in July 1941. That September the town's Jewish men were killed in the forest at Neroplia, and on December 12, 1941, the remaining Jews of the town and surrounding villages — about 1,200 people — were killed at the Mkhi ravine, three kilometers away. Relatives of this family may have been among them; research continues.
A memorial now stands at the site, with an inscription in Russian and Hebrew. The families that had emigrated, including this one, carried the town's memory with them.
Chapter Nine
Where the branches went
Seven siblings became seven branches, and the branches became hundreds of people. Much of what made it possible traces back to one man's improbable career: Aaron Chavenson, Bessie's husband, had been a tobacco merchant supplying the Russian Imperial Army's headquarters staff in Moscow — a rare position for a Jewish trader. He came back to the shtetl, married Bessie, and went ahead to America around 1890 carrying what family memory recalls as some $35,000 — a fortune for an immigrant. It was Chavenson money, the story goes, that paid for the younger siblings' tickets, and it was the Chavenson tenements that gave each new arrival a first address. Here is where each branch went next.
The Chavensons
Grain dealers, property owners, a bank directorship — and a street with the family's name. Daughter Hattie married her cousin Harry Yoken. Daughter Lillian married Jack Saden of Bridgeport; their son, Judge George A. Saden of the Connecticut Superior Court, endowed a scholarship at Yale named in part for his mother, Lillian Chavenson Saden. It is still awarded to students every year — Belinitz money, four generations on.
The Yokens of Second Street
Four children. Harry ran groceries and became an early merchant of a brand-new invention, frozen food — and earned a law degree in his forties, just to have it. Albert Benjamin (1900–1976) married Sylvia White; their son Mel — this page's first reader — is David's father. Esther Jessie taught school in Fall River and married into the Robin family; her line went south to Atlanta. Charles Raymond married Sylvia Marcus.
The Newmans & Alperts
Dora's daughter Jessie helped care for Abraham's children after Lillian went away. When Jessie married Jack Alpert in 1922, Abraham paid for much of the wedding and Uncle Joseph's bakery brought the goodies. The Alperts moved to California around 1925 — and Dora, who had once crossed an ocean, took the train across a continent to visit them. The branch continues in California and New England.
The Brooklyn Yokens
The baker's family moved to Brooklyn in the 1920s. Four children; son Max went on to California. Joseph is the one sibling buried in New York, at Mount Judah in Queens.
The Kanes
Celia and Morris raised seven children in Fall River. A son settled in Providence, and grandchildren stayed near Fall River — the branch that kept, hidden inside its American name, the priestly surname Cohen.
The fruit peddler's five
Louis made his life in Providence; Harry Erwin, Jessie, Bella, and Shirley grew up on Haffards Street, and the daughters later made homes in Hartford and around Boston.
The Molaskys of Bristol
Four children in Rhode Island: Harry — whose Hebrew name, Yeruchim Itzhok, was the rabbi's own; Jessie, who kept the family Bible and passed the story down; Adrian, who became a Marlow; and Ruth Stone, whose daughter — born fourteen months after Fannie died — carries the name Freda to this day.
One grandson deserves a page of his own. Richard L. Yoken — son of the cousins Harry and Hattie, born in Bridgeport in 1920 — graduated from Rutgers in 1941 and spent the Second World War at sea as a United States Navy officer: a wooden-hulled subchaser off Sicily and Italy, then a fast transport in the landings in southern France, rising to commander. In 2010, at ninety, he sat down for the Rutgers oral-history archive and told the family's story — including how the name was pronounced in the old country: "Yochen, with a guttural CH." A grandson of Belinitz, remembering it for the record.
Notice how the same names keep returning — the Harrys for Yerucham, the Jessies for Khasya. In this family, a name is how you keep someone.
Chapter Ten
How we know all this
For a century, the family's knowledge came down to one sentence, passed from Jessie Molasky to Dave Rubin: "The family came from Belinitz, in the Mogilev region." In July 2026, David R. Yoken — great-grandson of Abraham — set out to test that sentence against the records: gravestones, marriage registers, ship manifests, census sheets, naturalization petitions, court files, deeds, and city directories.
Then, two days into the search, an older witness surfaced: the Molasky family Bible, its record pages kept across half a century — most of them in the hand of Fannie's daughter Jessie, the same Jessie whose one sentence started it all. The pages hold what no government record could: that Yerucham Yitzchak was a rabbi and a teacher; that Khasya's brothers were named Shmeril and Chaim; that Fannie "escaped from Russia as a child with sister Celia, brother Sam & cousin Wm. Cohen" and landed at Castle Garden; and, boxed in red ink decades later, the days on which the family died.
The sentence held up, and the records filled in the rest: the parents' full names, the seven crossings, seventeen spellings of one surname, a grocery, a bakery, a street named Chavenson, and the two people in Belinitz — Yerucham Yitzchak and Khasya Raisa — whose names their grandchildren carried.
- ~1840sYerucham born; marries Khasya Raisa Gurevich, Belinitz
- 1868–82Seven children born in Belinitz
- ~1885/87Yerucham, then Khasya Raisa, die in Belinitz
- ~1890Bessie and Aaron Chavenson settle in Fall River
- 1891–96Abraham, Fannie, Celia, Joseph, and Samuel arrive
- 1898Abraham marries Lillian
- 1907Dora arrives with her six children; all seven siblings now in Fall River
- ~1911Abraham and his four children sit for a studio portrait — the only surviving photograph of the immigrant generation
- 1919Cousins Harry and Hattie marry in Newport
- 1929Family members return from a European trip via Cherbourg
- 1931–48Bessie (1931), Sam (1932), Joseph (1939, New York), Celia (1947), Dora and Fannie (1948) pass away
- 1941The Jewish community of Belinitz is destroyed in the Holocaust
- 1954/55Lillian, then Abraham, buried at Agudas Achim
- 2010Richard Yoken records the family's story for the Rutgers oral-history archive
- 2026The story is researched and written down; the Molasky family Bible resurfaces to confirm it