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Horon's avatar

Another explanation for origin of Khoronov surname is twofold. 1. Before 1917 Revolution in Russia the surname was ben Horon, after the Revolution many Jews russified their names i.e. Khoronov, -ov in Russian means same as ben in Hebrew - son of. 2.The actual origin of Horon is more complicated, on the road (old) to Jerusalem there was Canaan town of Horon, dedicated to Canaan God Horon, the place is mentioned in the Bible, currently there are now two settlements Movo Horon and Beit Horon, this is one possibile origin of the name. The other possibility is from old Hebrew word Horon, meaning one who loves freedom. In modern Hebrew two words that share same root is Herut and Horin, if I remember correctly. I share same last name and my family is also from Odessa.

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צמח's avatar

Likely he is your relative. The same town and the same unusual name.

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Ilya Pomanski's avatar

In the early 1950s, my grandmother was a surgeon in Moscow and was saved by her superior, Dr. Nikolay Yelansky OBM. Interestingly, this terror was quite chaotic. The NKVD would simply call the hospital administration office and demand that all Jewish staff report on a given day. Yelansky would warn my grandmother to skip work on certain days and then arranged for her to take an extended vacation. There was no order to this terror, much of it was random. Granted, she was not a prominent doctor at the time. I guess famous doctors could not escape so easily.

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har grizim's avatar

"Something I have not considered before. Post-war, Stalin’s campaign, against Jewish doctors. Especially if she lived then in Leningrad. It is plausible that she was a prominent doctor then and she faced a prison or worse. This would also explain why the family moved away."

— highly plausible!

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צמח's avatar

The soviet family that knew about the suicide probably sanitized the story in their memory or in real time. It's like people who vanished during Stalin days, who knows why they vanished. They just went for a walk and vanished…

And it was the family that grew in fear, after loosing their father Boris.

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har grizim's avatar

I know that Jewish doctors all over the USSR were driven out of their mind with fear of the "doctors' plot" crackdown. during that time, my grandmother (she was a doctor, and not even in a huge city where all such dangers were multiplied) left for work every day with a packed “prison bag”, in case she would not be returning home.

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