Find great rabbis among your ancestors? Find your family’s Spanish Sephardic roots? Trace your lineage all the way back to King David? It’s a real possibility.
How does a person who is passionate about learning about his or her family history act? It is, if you like, a whole branch of knowledge. You need to know what, how and where to look. Understand what sources of information exist. In fact, according to experts, a huge amount of information can be collected even before going to the archives.
Where do they teach that?
This year the project “Rod’N’Ya”, dedicated to the restoration of family history, began to operate in the CIS. The project is implemented by the Israeli institute Am Azikaron with the support of the Genesis Foundation and the participation of the Jewish youth organization Hillel. 120 young people from six CIS cities, including St. Petersburg, are researching their family history.
How is the project structured?
Jewish Roots Family History Recovery Project The project is a continuation of the “Generations” seminar, which is part of the Taglit program and consists of three stages. In the first, the “research” stage, the children try to find out as many details as possible about their family history. Those who show the highest result will get the opportunity to participate in an educational expedition to the places where Ashkenazi Jewry was born – 25 best participants will go on an expedition to Germany and the Czech Republic from September 2 to 8, 2015 and will literally walk through the places where their ancestors lived. Finally, the third stage is the realization of community projects related to the study of the history of the Jewish people.
“Listen! Watch! Think!”
This is called for in the textbook, which the children are using for the project. The authors of the manual teach them to work competently with available sources of information – their own relatives. Oral stories of grandparents, their diaries and family photo albums are an invaluable treasure trove of information. At first glance, it seems that we have access to the history of the three nearest generations, but in fact family lore usually extends up to the sixth generation.
So, relatives should be listened to carefully, ask leading questions and – put aside skepticism. Because the authors of the brochure are convinced that the most incredible family legend turns out to be true: “…your grandmother’s stories that her grandfather was a famous rabbi of Poland, wrote many books and made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem 120 years ago may turn out to be true”. The children are also given an important piece of advice: women know more family history than men, so a grandmother may be a more important source of information than a grandfather.
Jewish Roots is a project to reconstruct family history. Based on the stories of relatives, participants move on to the next stage – compiling a family tree, which needs to be built both in depth and breadth.
Another source of family history is a photo album. You should look at it very carefully, answering the following questions: Who is in this picture? When were the pictures taken? What do the clothes of the people in the pictures tell us? The inscriptions on the backs are an important source of information. And, finally, the obtained data should be analyzed (that’s what it means to “think”!), paying attention to any inconsistencies – in them the key to the real family history is hidden!
Pre-archival research
But here is the basic information about several generations of the family collected, the tree is compiled. What’s next? And then comes the most interesting work of searching for additional information about the family. And here the authors of the manual provide a detailed selection of sources in which this information can be searched.
Thus, it makes sense to look for information about members of the World War II generation in the databases of the Yad Vashem memorial, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington (www.ushmm.org) and various burial sites. It is pleasant to note that the website of the Jewish Cemetery of St. Petersburg www.jekl.ru is listed as one of the sources.
Aerobatics techniques
Professionals in the field of Jewish family history reconstruction have even more sophisticated sources and methods.
Am Azikaron Institute researcher Nehama Rosenberg tells the story: – It is easiest to work with Sephardic families. In these families, the traditions of name inheritance were very strictly observed. If you can get a hold of a string of names, you can quickly trace the family’s roots back to Spain .
Jewish Roots Family History Recovery Project. The Ashkenazi family history is more complicated, but there is much to be found here as well. In our research we use rabbinic sources, where, according to tradition, the history of the family is set forth. A rabbi writes a halakhic work, but in the preface, afterword, and various inserts, he recounts the history of his family and mentions the families of other rabbis. Unfortunately, secular science does not pay attention to these sources. Well, religious researchers do not turn to secular sources – archives. If these methods are combined, one can almost reach the heroes of the Bible!
Take, for example, the name Feldman (“Man of the Field”). It’s a common surname, used by many people. But, thanks to rabbinical books, we found the rabbinical family Feldman, who lived in Belarus. From them came the famous Israeli rabbinical family Porush, known since the beginning of the 19th century. Among its representatives was the rabbi of Hebron, heads of the famous “Lithuanian” yeshivas, etc… Digging further, we discovered that the Belarusian-Lithuanian branch of the family goes back to Maaral from Prague, and his roots are known – he belongs to the descendants of King David!
To find a famous ancestor
In the course of research, many project participants discovered that they are descendants of famous rabbinical dynasties: Shapiro, Ginzburg, Rabinovich, Schneersons and Braude. Also among the prominent relatives of the project participants are the second Prime Minister of Israel – Moshe Sharet, prominent representatives of Russian merchants and industrialists – the families of Tseytlins, Schershevskys and Krolei.
Feedback from St. Petersburg participants
Ilya Tsvetkov:
– Calling, visiting my relatives, I gathered information about my ancestors bit by bit, and the more I learned, the more interesting it became. After all, in addition to names and surnames, sometimes found out the most interesting details. One of them was connected with the father of my great-grandfather – Saveliy (Zaveliy) Galperin and his relatives, who immigrated to the USA in 1917, and later, having arrived already in the USSR, could not meet him.
It is great that Jews all over the world painstakingly kept and maintain archives in which, nowadays, it is possible to get information about what was centuries ago. Thanks to it it is possible to find relatives in the most unusual places of the planet and not only to find, but also to contact them! Thank you to the “Rodnya” project for this opportunity and support!
Antonina Pivovarova:
– Participants in the Ancestry Project have an amazing opportunity to delve into their family history, to find out who their ancestors were, where they lived and what they did. They tell us how and where to find information, help us understand the materials we find, conduct webinars and answer many of our questions. Even in the very first stages, I was able to learn that my great-grandmother had three children, not just my grandfather. I learned about the fate of two girls during the war years, that my great-grandfather fought for the village of Fedkovo, and then reburied in another place, although we had thought otherwise all our lives.
Thanks to the “Rodnya” project, people learn the history of their relatives, understand who their ancestors were, faces in old photographs find their names and their destiny, instead of remaining forgotten images, people find their lost relatives, and families reconnect. And isn’t that the most important thing?! Thank you for this opportunity to the people who have created and run the “Kin” project!
For those who are interested in family history, we suggest familiarizing themselves with the “Metaklan Theory” put forward by scientists at the Am Azikaron Research Institute. In brief, the essence of the theory is that the life of each Jewish family is accompanied by surprising regularities: members of the same family, unaware of each other’s existence, choose the same spheres of activity, their destinies paradoxically repeat themselves, etc.