People of Memory. Probably, sooner or later, each of us asks himself the following questions: why am I the way I am, what made me choose my profession, how did I decide to create a family with this person and not with another? Did I do it consciously or accidentally, by the will of circumstances? The answers will be as different as we are…. But few would suggest that the explanation must be sought deep in history, and not just one’s own family.
– We managed to discover, and we are convinced of this, that within any Jewish family, certain characteristics, human qualities are preserved for at least centuries, during which we had the opportunity to observe them,” says Yitzhak Fuchson, a volunteer and advisor to the Am Azikaron Institute for Jewish Heritage, Culture and Genealogy, established in Tel Aviv almost a quarter of a century ago, in a telephone interview. – And so we found out that the history of every family has certain patterns, such as people’s choice not even of professions, but of certain fields of endeavor, which is repeated over the centuries. Let’s say a person who lived 500 years ago carried out some program of changes in society. His descendant, living in our time, devotes himself to the same, although in a different professional aspect. And the most interesting thing is that there seems to be no direct connection between them, but there is a certain genetic charge that induces them to engage in this very business. In one family periodically appear extremely successful people, endowed with the ability to make some discoveries or get rich, in another – rarely stable marriages concluded. And someone constantly gets into all sorts of trouble, but remains unharmed…..
– But how is it passed on to the next generation?
– In order to understand this, we have managed to develop a whole system based on the concept of “meta-clan”. This is a system that unites several branches of one clan, whose representatives may be scattered all over the world, may not know about each other’s existence at all, but nevertheless have common qualities. And, what is also very important, the ability to recognize, it happens in the vast majority of cases unconsciously. While in biology and in any field of science related to living nature, there is such a concept as “kin recognition”, kin recognition. From our point of view, this plays a very significant role in the life of the Jewish people. Suppose you meet people whose ancestors had some relation to yours, and you have certain reasons to believe that you have something in common with them, will be friends, or you will have business relations, and so on. To make it clearer: here in front of me hangs on the wall a genealogical tree, which was created by the founder of our institute, Alexander Yonatan Widgop. He started his research about 40 years ago, knowing only 35 relatives. Today there are already 1600 of them, and all of them are descendants of one person who lived 300 years ago, almost a full nine generations, between which it was possible to establish a certain connection. And in terms of data availability, this family is not somehow exceptional. Unlike, for example, rabbinic families, where the percentage of people who have left a mark in history is high, and the continuity is clearly traceable. That is, the information can be restored, one way or another…..
It should be clarified that my interlocutor, Yitzhak Fuchson, is a theoretical physicist by specialty, a doctor of sciences, and deals with complex systems, their statistics, and everything that goes by the name of “randomness”. The choice of profession, he says, was forced. Dreaming of becoming a mathematician, he tried to enter Leningrad University, but the notorious “fifth graph” proved to be an insurmountable obstacle. Then he applied to another institute, to the physics department. – It’s interesting that among the relatives I knew personally,” recalls Itzhak, “there was one adult who was involved in experimental physics. But what I didn’t know at the time was that of only one branch of our large family, about 30-40 percent of the men are representatives of this science, in its various fields. That’s a matter of coincidence…
– How do we explain that some people have these abilities and others do not?
– You see, the qualities we talked about are not literally preserved, not that children necessarily resemble their parents, and those parents resemble their parents, and so on. It is much more complicated, several generations can be skipped, for various reasons. So it is a complex system, and it exists due to the fact that the choice of partners we make is not really random. It’s largely predetermined by family history, broadly speaking. And this is a unique key to understanding how the Jewish people have persisted over the millennia. We can assume that each family has some mission in the general system, and since the nation is somehow made up of these families, each of them, without realizing it, represents some very necessary part of the Jewish people, helps it to survive, to pass through history… This is the task set before us by the Almighty, no matter what meaning we put into it. And once again confirms that nothing is accidental, and everything that happens is because it has to happen, one way or another….
– But how do you manage to find these patterns? After all, much, unfortunately, has been lost…..
– By bits and pieces, literally all over the world, archival information is collected from all possible sources: archival, bibliographic, oral interviews, giving a lot of material. And even if the information, at first glance, looks unreliable, there is still some basis, a thread, unwinding which you can learn a lot….
– What is the practical value of your research?
– For those who come to us, the Institute gives them the opportunity to learn what their ancestors were like, what they did, what abilities they had, and this helps them to live, often changing their attitude to themselves and increasing their self-esteem. Realization that you continue some family tradition on this earth changes the meaning of every step, every deed. It helps to see hidden talents in children and to develop them. More specifically, the Institute conducts family research to order, just call or send an e-mail to the address listed on the website, provides certificates of origin of families, reunites them. In essence, restores the history of the family, and this brings great joy. Creates a family tree that helps a person understand who they are and what their place is in the chain of generations. There are simpler things, such as making wonderful posters for some special family holidays, events. The Institute helps to meet those whom a person saw once, in childhood, long forgotten, but there are common photos. And it is very touching when two different families suddenly find each other. And sometimes you can clearly see yourself in a photo of a seemingly stranger – the very recognition I mentioned at the beginning. There are many cases when a couple lives all their lives and they don’t realize that their great-grandparents are from the same small place… Sometimes you can make a crazy breakthrough, when people think that everyone died in the Shoah, and we find survivors or their descendants. It was a shock for me when a person with our help found his own grandmother, his mother’s mother, whom he had never seen….
– What makes you divide your time between physics and genealogy, which requires a tremendous amount of patience and time?
– If we talk about personal motivation, you know, when you want to understand something about our life, it seems to me that you should grab it with all your strength and try to do it. Because a person’s life flies by quickly, and what is missed today cannot be regained tomorrow. And what drives us in our research is the desire to identify and realize what the connection of times is. This is a very often used term, but we concretize it, trying to understand what unites Jews who lived, say, 100 or 200 years ago, with those who live now. Or, from a broader perspective, how similar we are to the people before whom the sea parted almost four thousand years ago, opening the way to freedom …