Jewish Ancestry
Question
I have a question not about faith, but about lineage. This whole ancestry thing has gotten so popular as so many are shelling out a lot of money to find out where they came from. But in the Tanach the Jews kept incredible records pertaining to ancestry. Are most Jews still able to trace their lineage way back, or was that just an ancient thing?
Answers
No, most Jews are not really able to trace their ancestry very far – not because it is no longer important but because the Holocaust destroyed an immeasurable amount of historical information both pertaining to Jewish communities and to individuals as well.
In my humble opinion, after the immeasurable and irreplaceable loss of life, possibly the greatest tragedy of the Holocaust was the loss of all of the historical records. Communities that had existed for centuries (and sometimes for longer than that) just disappeared.
Best wishes from the AskTheRabbi.org Team