Help needed to find Jewish family member

[Squash64]

A friend has asked me to try to find the answer to this, so here goes.....

She has a friend who is Jewish.  This woman's son has just announced that he is going to 'marry out' and the woman is distraught. She is clinging to the hope that somewhere in the girlfriend's family tree there will be a Jewish woman meaning that the GF is also Jewish.

Does anyone know if it is possible to find out about Jewish relatives?  Maybe someone has done geneology and knows how to go about it?
The Jewish Momma doesn't know where to start and has no internet skills which is why she has asked my friend for help.  I told my friend that perhaps someone here would know where to start.

Any ideas anyone?

[Squash64]

[djbrenton]

Quite often someone has already done a lot of the family research. If they/you take the free trial on ancestry.com and search for the earliest known ancestors then you may discover a whole family tree. Establishing whether an ancestor was Jewish is another matter.

[Unwashed]

You might start here, but it's not a simple question.  I take it the GF is not interested in converting to Judaism?

[gordonsveg]

If i dont want any of my children to marry a (coloured) person i am accused of being racist so isnt your friend in the same position?

[Squash64]

Quite often someone has already done a lot of the family research. If they/you take the free trial on ancestry.com and search for the earliest known ancestors then you may discover a whole family tree. Establishing whether an ancestor was Jewish is another matter.

Thanks for the link, I had a look myself and it looks very interesting.  Might have a go too.  I sent it to my friend.

[Squash64]

You might start here, but it's not a simple question.  I take it the GF is not interested in converting to Judaism?

Thanks for the link, I sent it to my friend and she is very impressed that I got two such helpful replies so quickly. :)

[Squash64]

If i dont want any of my children to marry a (coloured) person i am accused of being racist so isnt your friend in the same position?

I'm only asking the question on behalf of my friend's friend, I don't know her views on the situation.

[Squash64]

You might start here, but it's not a simple question.  I take it the GF is not interested in converting to Judaism?

Sorry, I meant to say that it might be more a case of the Momma wanting a 'proper' Jewish daughter-in-law, rather than a convert.  I don't know the woman but I gather from my friend that she is Orthodox.

[OllieC]

If i dont want any of my children to marry a (coloured) person i am accused of being racist so isnt your friend in the same position?

Jews believe that they are God's chosen people (it does say this in the old testament after all so you can't blame them!)... I would say that to discriminate on the basis of religion or colour is pretty much the same thing (especially when you tie religion & race together), but they believe they are blessed and have a debt to God in return, so it's an obligation to do certain things... IMHO they have much bigger chips on their shoulder to fix before I get upset about them not letting me marry them!

I can also understand people wanting to keep their family members happy, having married into a protestant N Irish family!

[Heartysoup]

Your friend's friend needs to help this woman overcome her irrational fear and discourage her from looking for jewish ancestors and ultimately digging herself into a great big hole.

Worse things could happen to her son !!

[asbean]

He might even love his girlfriend  :o :o :o

She is certainly irrational.  Colour, race, culture, religion, nationality - the more they are mixed up the better.

[PurpleHeather]

You may find this web site useful. It will certainly make interesting reading for the mother

http://www.truthnet.org/TheMessiah/2_HistoryofJudaism/

I always thought that all Jews were directly descended from the chosen people but the fact is, that there were a lot of converts. So, momma may well be from those Jews herself and no more pure blood than the GF.

Ancestry can be traced using several search engines, sadly they all charge and it is unlikely that they go back further than 150 years in the UK when a census was introduced for the simple purpose of working out how many men of soldiering age could be recruited to fight the many wars going on.

Knowing this a lot of people did not bother to put their names on. Church records of marriages and baptism are used for ancestry but that is not much use to a Jew.

It is possible to employ some one to do ancestry research. One of my cousins did this and as it effected one half of my family I was given a copy. Even with this, some of the entries are only assumed because the record keepers wrote down the names and since the populace was often illiterate No one bothered much about the exactness of the spelling.

Another method of research is through genetics. It is now possible to show what percentage of a person originates from elsewhere. The swab can be taken and sent for genealogical testing. When it comes back it could show that the GF has a percentage of inherited 'blood' from an area where there is known to be or have been a Jewish population. I would suggest that this research could be the least expensive and the most accurate.

[lewic]

My sister has found out loads of info from Ancestry.com - including that my great grandmother fled Germany just before the second world war, and ran a shop in London (I hate to think what abuse she got!)

If the Jewish mother is so proud of her heritage maybe she could sit down with the prospective daughter in law and research their backgrounds together, she would probably find they had more in common than they thought. Religion is the root of so much evil.

[Squash64]

Thank you so much to everyone who sent such helpful replies to my question.  I've passed all the information to my friend so it's up to her now.

[artichoke]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/programmes/belief/scripts/neuberger.shtml


I met Rabbi Julia Neuberger the other day with some Jewish friends and thought she was a wonderful person. Right at the end of this interview she says some interesting things about marrying out which the mother might agree to read and think about. Of course it doesn't help that the mother is orthodox and Julia is liberal - nevertheless she is a Rabbi and what she says carries some weight. Here is a quote:



Q Just to revert finally to your Jewish faith and your life and your faith in that life, how d'you feel about your descendants? Are you concerned as many Jews are, about assimilation and marrying out?


A I would like to have Jewish grandchildren and great grandchildren. I believe that we're probably not, in the Jewish community, going the right way about that. I don't think that those of us who have run synagogues and so on are necessarily making that enormously attractive to quite a lot of people. And I think we have to reach out in very different ways and encourage people to be Jewish in very different ways. So am I concerned? Absolutely I'm concerned, but I don't believe that marrying people who aren't Jewish, or living with people who aren't Jewish - and being married isn't even that common any more - I don't think that necessarily means the end of a sense of being Jewish. I think we have to be more open, more welcoming, and to recognise as Jewish the children of one Jewish parent, whether it's the mother or the father. Just accept more people into, perhaps a looser description of being Jewish. I do want to have Jewish grandchildren.


Q There is a conundrum though finally isn't there, between this very strong Jewish identity which you share and which is of course strong throughout the community, and the liberal view that wants to be benign about any attempt to dilute it?


A I think they're two things you have to look at. I think you have to say, if you really want to keep Jews pure as it were, then essentially you're talking about living in a ghetto - though it would be a self-imposed ghetto. If you say, if you say 'We welcome liberal society and we want to live in the wider society,' the truth of the matter is that your children are likely to meet and fall in love with, and marry or live with people who aren't Jewish. I think we have to make a choice. Do we want to live in the self-imposed ghetto? No, in my view. I think the ghetto has been bad for the Jews, whether self-imposed or imposed upon us. If we want to live in an open society, we have to take the consequences of that. And the consequences of that are, that we will be much more mixed. Then how do you get Judaism to survive? And I think that that's doing it by welcoming in and recognising people will have rather complicated identities, which is as true of other groups as of Jews, but that if the values are important and the customs are important, they'll survive.