Bensignor

Spain · Turkey · America

We stand on the shoulders of giants.

This is the story of the family of Eli and Adele Bensignor — descendants, we believe, of Don Abraham Seneor of Spain, Court Treasurer to Ferdinand and Isabella, and a leader of Spanish Jewry at the time of the 1492 Expulsion.

1492
The Alhambra Decree and the Expulsion from Sepharad
500+ years
An oral tradition passed down, unchanged
3 continents
Spain, Turkey, and the New World

Our Sephardic Heritage

Portrait of Eli and Adele Bensignor

This website, www.bensignor.us, is devoted to the family of Eli and Adele Bensignor, their three adult children Laurence Bensignor, Rick Bensignor and Lisa Bensignor Gibson, and their respective families.

We believe, as you will learn in these pages, that we are direct descendants of Don Abraham Seneor of Spain, who together with Don Isaac Abravanel, was the leader of the Jewish community in Spain leading up to and at the time of the Spanish Expulsion of Jews in 1492.

We are a family filled with pride in our history and legacy as Sephardic Jews… in Spain, in Turkey and for the last century, in America.

Welcome to our story.

The Archive

Bensignor is a Jewish Name. It's a Sephardic Name.

By definition, Sephardic Jews trace their roots to the Iberian Peninsula — and our family's story has been passed down, unchanged, since 1492.

Laurence Bensignor on Abraham Seneor, Our Last Spanish Ancestor?

Court Treasurer of Spain, Chief Rabbi of Seville, Crown Rabbi of Castile — and the man whose name became ours.

To Turkey and The New World

Our last name remains the same 500 years beyond the Spanish Expulsion of Jews — from Smyrna to Havana to New York.

There's More to Our Family Legacy. A lot More.

Chief Rabbis of Smyrna, Nice, Turin, the Ottoman Empire and Egypt — the legacy runs through our father's mother's side too.

Three members of the Bensignor family

“Our direct ancestor was the Court Treasurer of Spain.”

The same sentence, told identically by Bensignors in the United States, Argentina, France, Israel, Spain and Turkey — for more than five hundred years.