The Am a-Zikaron Institute is dedicated to restoring the history of Jewish families and popularizing this topic. We dream that every Jew should know his historical roots. Children who come to Israel under the Taglit program participate in our seminar, where they receive initial information about the origin of their family. On the initiative and with the support of the Genesis Charitable Foundation, we expanded the project and made an annual program “Rod’N’ya”, in which young people from 18 to 35 years old who have been to Taglit can participate. The program “Rod’N’ya” is intended for those who returned from a trip to Israel, fascinated by the idea of their own Jewishness, fascinated by the country. We want to support these sentiments and try to channel them into some kind of communal activity. That the interest, which has arisen at children for 10 days of stay in Israel, did not disappear and after their departure, that they have learned: and in their city there are many people living Jewish life, and on any taste – and ultra-religious, and secular. We disseminated information about Rod’N’y through Hillel branches throughout the post-Soviet space. The result was the participation of 200 people in the project in the first year of its realization.
Family history “for dummies”
“Rod’N’Ya” is a program for those who want to know the history of their family, but have absolutely no idea how to approach it. We tell participants in detail where they should start and what to look for from the very beginning. For example, you can learn a lot from family photos. A photo of a grandfather or great-grandfather in a military uniform will tell you what troops he served in. Maybe he was a military engineer or a military doctor? There are other little-noticed details that give extremely valuable information. For example, one of the participants of our program did not know where his great-grandmother was born. But after looking at her photo, he found the address of the photo studio in the town of Nemirova. In general, there are a great many details that an untrained person simply does not pay attention to.
Tools for working with history
There are three tools for finding family roots. The first and main one is to interview relatives, near and distant, and even better – very distant, about whom the person did not suspect: they are the ones who usually have the most valuable information. The second resource is information from the Internet, from memoir histories and books to databases of historical data, registration books, lists of burials in cemeteries, digitized by enthusiasts. And finally, the third is archives. We teach how to work with them, explain when it makes sense to look for information in the registry office, and when – in the historical archive. There are also sources that are not always available to the Russian-speaking public: rabbinic literature written in Hebrew. During the entire time of the project, the participants are assisted by professional researchers: first they teach them how to search for information, and then they accompany them, practically leading them by the hand at all stages.
Non-random accidents
A project participant from Moscow traveled to Minsk to find his great-grandmother’s marriage certificate in the local archive. When he received a digital copy of a sheet from the rabbinical book of marriage registration, it turned out that the second line in the records on the sheet was a record of his great-grandmother’s marriage registration. And the first line was a similar entry concerning the great-grandfather of another participant in the same project – from Yekaterinburg! I really like such coincidences, because I am sure they are not really random.
A glimpse through seven centuries
Six participants of the “Rod’N’Ya” project directly or indirectly belong to the Rapoport family. And each of them made a research, ending with different periods of the XIX century. But the striking rabbinical family of Rapoportovs is known since XIII century, it is a family with an amazing history, a lot of colorful characters who lived on a huge space from Germany and Italy to Belorussia and Galicia! We want the participants to connect through the history of their own family with one or another Jewish family. And we tell them what these families are, what the Rapoports or Feldmans have been doing for the last seven centuries.
The metaphysics of awakening
There is an interesting phenomenon in our work. People who belong to the same families but do not know about each other suddenly come to us at the same time. While this year we had six Rapoports, a couple of years ago another project involved five people from different countries with the surname Derbaremdiker (“Merciful” in Yiddish). All of them are descendants of the famous Hasidic tzaddik Levi Itzkach from Berdichev. He was nicknamed Derbaremdiker because he began every prayer with this word. Today there are only a couple hundred Derbaremdikers in the world! And when five of them came to us at once, we had the feeling that it was the Rabbi himself who had set foot on the land of Jerusalem. We are looking forward to the next project, we want to find out which Jewish family will “awaken” next!
Lost history
Sometimes all the threads of family history are lost. It is a never-ending tragedy when a great-grandfather, due to his duty of service or because of the orders that existed in the USSR, told no one anything about his family, relatives, and his origins until the end of his life. Unfortunately, it is difficult to work in such cases, because relatives are the main source of information. Sometimes in search of the truth people find very distant relatives whom their families have not seen for tens of years. The peculiarity of working with children from the CIS is that many of them do not know anything about their ancestry at all. For example, it took us a long time to convince one of the participants that he was a descendant of an extremely famous Hasidic Ukrainian family, one of the most famous Hasidic tzaddiks. He himself was sure that he came from a very simple family with no one but artisans.
In the footsteps of ancient communities
We conducted an expedition to the sites of ancient Jewish communities in Germany. We visited not places where someone’s specific ancestors lived, but places of settlement and roads of migration, the stories of their families before they became Russian-speaking. And also – cities with names – Landau, Oppenheim and others. For a week we covered the period from V to XVIII century, that is 13 centuries of Jewish history. One of the goals of our project is to connect participants not only with Russian Jewry, but also with the global Jewish world. It is important to see with our own eyes the landscape in which our ancestors existed many centuries ago, and to awaken in our young contemporaries a sense of connection to this place, to this world, to Jewish history.