Young people from St. Petersburg – participants of the Taglit project – visited the Diaspora Museum today as part of their acquaintance with Israel. But, it was not an easy excursion, the young people were looking for their Jewish roots.
“Taglit” – is the best-known program to date that allows Diaspora Jewish youth to experience Israel. However, Taglit is no longer limited to classic excursions and sightseeing.
A group of young people from St. Petersburg came to the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv to find their roots. The journey through the museum’s exhibition halls was more like a theatrical show.
During one and a half hours of excursion young people are not just told about Babylonian exile or times of Bogdan Khmelnitsky, but also visually show that they are a part of Jewish history and a part of the people, because the whole history of Jews concerns them personally.
Says Gennady Yusim, actor: “I discover something new and interesting every time. This project is interesting not so much as an acting project, but because we rediscover our own Jewishness. Our own, maybe lost and misplaced names.
The authors of the idea, realized with the support of the Genesis Foundation at the Museum of the Diaspora, is a real research institute “Am ha-Zikaron“, which has been engaged in Jewish genealogy for many years. Our surnames and genealogy are the roots that connect us to Jewishness.
Says Malka Haguel-Spitzberg, administrative director of the Jewish Heritage Research Institute “Am ha-Zikaron”: “We are trying to tell that if, for example, a person is from a famous Jewish rabbinical family, this is the energy that is in him. This is the energy that will be passed on to his children, and he should know that he is, for example, a descendant of King David, or he is a descendant of a family of famous bankers, or he is a descendant of rabbis from Bialystok, as was the case in this group”.
In this group of young St. Petersburgers they even found a real person of royal blood. Tatiana turned out to be a descendant of a royal-Jewish-Polish family.
Says Tatiana Nikiforova, a Taglit participant: “Well, of course I didn’t know. I knew about my grandfather, who died during the war. I knew about him, but I didn’t know about such distant, distant ancestors. Are you bringing your parents a present? I’ve already written to my father that I’m an august person, and so has he. He was pleased and said we’d have a feast when I got home.” .
Certificates with the history of surnames, books as a gift and good mood. We have been looking for such a form of presentation for several years. The effect exceeded all expectations. Young people are interested, not bored and, most importantly, each of these guys discovers the history of his own family.
That’s how, within a few hours of the tour, it suddenly turns out that Katz is not only someone who was teased in class, but also a descendant of the high priests, Katzenelenbogen once ruled Poland, and all of us have deep Jewish roots, not only in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, but also in Germany or Holland.
Boris Stern