27.01.2012 03.Schwat. 5772 Auschwitz-Gedenk-Tag
Feature:
Shorashim director: We thought it was just about getting Jews out of the Soviet Union – but it’s not.
The people behind the Israeli organization Shorashim are a cross between bespeckled librarians and Jewish Indiana Jones: No far-flung Ukrainian village is too remote, no archives are too dusty to find a long-forgotten document. They are scrambling against time, the enemy that is slowly erasing the past.
The six-year-old Shorashim organization traffics not in priceless antiques, but in proving Jewish identities to the Rabbinate, Israel’s religious governing body. After the fall of the Soviet Union, 1.1 million Soviet Jews immigrated to Israel under the Law of Return, which requires just one Jewish grandparent on either side in order to be considered Jewish….