A new family of Ce-containing scintillator materials is introduced. In this work, we report on the crystal growth of KGd2Cl7:Ce and CsGd2Cl7:Ce via the Vertical Gradient Freeze method. Various Ce concentrations from 0.5 to 10 at% have been tested to study the effect of dopant concentration on scintillation performance. Both KGd2Cl7:Ce and CsGd2Cl7:Ce have demonstrated good properties for gamma ray and thermal neutron detection. Scintillation light yield was ~30,000 ph/MeV for KGd2Cl7: 3% Ce and ~38,000 ph/MeV for CsGd2Cl7: 3% Ce. The crystals exhibited layered structure with cleavage planes.