Abraham-Leib ben Yitshak Monsohn (Hebrew: ר' אברהם-לייב ב' יצחק מאנזאהן/מונזון), known as "Avrom-Leib Shames" (1804–1870),[1] was a member of the first Ashkenazi prayer quorum of Perushim in the Old Yishuv community of Jerusalem at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

[4] His first wife was Zelda;[5] he later married Dahde, believed to have been of the Maghrebim or North African Jewish community of Hebron (or maybe the references are to the same woman, using different names).

[6] Abraham-Leib was the first beadle and caretaker (shamash) of the Menachem Zion and Rabbi Yehudah He-Hasid (Hurva) synagogues in the Old City of Jerusalem,[7] and of Rachel's Tomb on the outskirts of Bethlehem.

[8] He was also an aid to community leader Shlomo Zalman Zoref and in 1836 accompanied him to Egypt to obtain the permission of Muhammad Ali to build the Hurva synagogue.

[9] Abraham-Leib's son, Yoel Yosef Shimon Monsohn (Jerusalem, c.1843-c.1907),[10] called "Shimen Shames,"[11][12] later assumed the communal tasks his father had performed,[13] by commission of Sir Moses Montefiore.

[16] Shimen Shames was married to Gittel (née Yofe),[17][18] whose family migrated to Hebron with fellow members of the Chabad hasidic movement in Shklov in the 1820s.

Monsohn Lithography in the Old City of Jerusalem, in the courtyard opposite what is today the Isaac Kaplan Old Yishuv Court Museum (Hebrew: מוזיאון חצר היישוב הישן), where Abraham-Leib resided with his wife Rachel-Leah Miriam, a descendant of the Old Yishuv Honig family.

Descendants of Abraham-Leib II and Moshe-Mordechai Monsohn engaged in rabbinics, public service, printing, and the arts and sciences.

Menachem Mendel's grandson Jesse Aronson was an Executive Technology Director at Synectics, Mclean, Virginia.

David M. Aronson, Menachem Mendel's great grandson, was a Steadicam operator, DP, and video engineer in Washington, DC.

1902), travelled with her father to Beirut to study hat-making and ran a successful millinery shop in the center of Jerusalem.

Rabbi Menachem Mendel Monsohn (Jerusalem, 1895; New York, 1953), a son of Abraham-Leib II, immigrated to the United States in 1924 and published several editions of Mi-Peninei Ha-Rambam: Bi'ur 'al ha-Torah, a compendium of Maimonides' commentaries on the Pentateuch, arranged by the compiler in order of the Torah chapters, in New York in the 1930s.

Members of the family still possess the secret key to Rachel's Tomb commissioned by Sir Moses Montefiore.