How It All Began
This story began nearly thirty years ago, when Alexander Jonathan Vidgop, the founder of the Am haZikaron Institute, set out to research his own family tree.
He began with a list of just 35 known relatives — and eventually reestablished connections to more than 1,500 other members of his family.
Along the way he discovered something striking: relatives who for over a century had not even suspected one another’s existence, living in different countries and on different continents, often followed remarkably similar paths in life — choosing the same professions, showing the same inclinations, and frequently achieving almost identical results.
What at first glance might have seemed an improbable coincidence served as the impetus for founding a nonprofit institute with one central task: to investigate systematically whether such patterns appear in other Jewish family lines as well.
The Founding of Am HaZikaron (1998)
The Am haZikaron Institute was formally established in 1998 for the scientific study of intergenerational connections within the Jewish people. Ten years of painstaking work, grounded in a strict empirical approach, brought impressive results. The Institute’s researchers:
Reconstructed Jewish family trees reaching back 900 years.
Identified unique hereditary patterns through systematic analysis of vast datasets.
- Published their findings in respected academic journals.
- Received the Zeitei Yerushalayim (“Olives of Jerusalem”) medal for outstanding contribution to preserving Jewish heritage.
- Won the support of a distinguished public committee that includes 55 Nobel laureates.
The Central Discovery: The Family “Mission”
Am haZikaron’s research showed that members of a single Jewish line can preserve traits distinctive to their family across many centuries. These findings echo the biblical idea that every family line carries its own purpose — a mission passed from generation to generation and embodied in the family’s history. Century after century, members of one family display shared patterns:
- Professional fields. Descendants typically concentrate their efforts in four or five specific spheres of activity — and often reach exceptional heights in them.
Way of life. Stable behavioral patterns run through families: some lines migrate frequently, while others stay rooted in one place for centuries; in some families frequent divorce becomes the norm, in others lifelong unions prevail.
The nature of genius. Developing the theory of the family mission, researchers analyzed the ancestries of eminent people. They found Jewish families in which, once every few generations, a genius predictably appears in one quite specific field — mathematics, physics, commerce — exerting immense influence on the course of world history.
What It Means for Young Jews of the Diaspora
Extending its research into demographic genetics and the historical reconstruction of communities, the Institute has created a unique educational tool for young Jews who have lost touch with their roots. At Am haZikaron seminars, many participants are profoundly shaken when they:
- Learn who founded their family line and where their family came from.
- Discover the remarkable people who belonged to their own line.
- Feel that, as memory is restored, a part of themselves returns with it — and realize that the true road to finding oneself begins with the history of one’s own family.
The Key Concept: What Is Yikhes?
The central mission of Am haZikaron is to restore family memory. No word expresses this idea better than the beautiful Yiddish term yikhes.
- It derives from the Hebrew yichus — “kinship,” “descent” — while yohasin denotes genealogy as such.
Yikhes is far more than a dry family tree of names and dates: it is the living history of a family — its origins, the bond between its generations, its unbroken memory, its traditions and its legacy.
And it is yikhes that — to a far greater degree than is commonly assumed — has shaped individual destinies and the historical path of the entire Jewish people.