Someone You Should Meet

When Tom Chestnut started looking into his genealogy, he was surprised to learn that his grandfather had three brothers and a sister. Digging deeper, he uncovered a large family tree, the branches of which had no connection to each other, except that they all shared the same ancestors, Judith and Machman Chasanoff, who immigrated to the United States from what is now Ukraine in the early 1900s to escape the Russian pogroms and conscription.

Tom's research led him to me, his second cousin and a documentary filmmaker living in Chicago, who at the time was running a social justice nonprofit media organization focused on youth and bias issues. It also led him to Debra (Chas) Chasnoff, another second cousin from a different branch and another documentary filmmaker living in San Francisco and running a social justice nonprofit media organization focused on youth and bias issues!

"I think there is someone you should meet," he said with a wink to each of us.

And so, we did. Intrigued that we had so much in common, we began a conversation to discover what other commonalities might exist in the extended Chasanoff clan. Who are the "Chasanoffs" today? How did we get so disconnected from each other? How have our Jewish identity, values and cultural practices changed over the past century?

We decided to bring the extended family together to answer these questions and many more. For the first time since Judith and Machman brought their children across the Atlantic on a steamer ship, more than 125 members of the extended family met each other at a weekend gathering in the Catskills in June 2016. This event forms the basis of a documentary that explores some of the psychological, religious, and political complexities of a fractured family tree.