Gersoni, Henry
GERSONI, HENRY
GERSONI, HENRY (Heb., Gershoni, Ẓevi Hirsch ; 1844–1897), journalist and author. Born in Vilna, he studied in the Vilna Rabbinical Seminary. Moving to St. Petersburg, he married a Christian girl and converted to Christianity. In 1868 he publicly confessed his conversion in Ha-Maggid, a leading Hebrew periodical, but announced his repentance and reaffirmed his loyalty to Judaism. After many wanderings, he settled in New York in 1869. In 1874 he became a rabbi in Macon, Georgia. He also served as rabbi in Atlanta and in Chicago, where he published his short-lived weekly The Jewish Advance and, later, The Maccabean. He returned to New York in 1893 where he lived by his pen until his death.
Devoted to the new Hebrew literature, Gersoni published articles in the leading Hebrew periodicals. He was also a pioneer of the Yiddish press in America, editor of the Post in New York (1870), and a contributor to Jewish periodicals in the English language. He translated Turgenev into English and Longfellow's Excelsior into Hebrew.
Gersoni wrote on the burning problems of the day: Orthodoxy and Reform, immigration to America and to Palestine, ethical culture, organizational life of Jewry. His subjective and acute observations of the American scene are still of historic importance, e.g., in his Sketches of Jewish Life and History (1873).
bibliography:
J. Kabakoff, Ḥalutzei ha-Sifrut ha-Ivrit ba-Amerikah (1966), 79–130.
[Eisig Silberschlag]