How Raoul Wallenberg helped Israeli woman prove she is Jewish
After Rabbinate refuses to register young woman for marriage, Shorashim Center locates an original visa received by her grandmother in Hungary in 1944, signed by the Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust.
The original document signed by Wallenberg, as a Swedish diplomat, for the grandmother has convinced the Rabbinical Court in Petah Tikva that she was Jewish, and that her granddaughter can therefore get married in Israel according to Jewish Law.
Yael, whose parents immigrated from Hungary in the 1980s, was born in Israel. Several months ago, at the age of 25, she tried to register for marriage - but was turned down.
She presented her birth certificate and her mother's birth certificate, as well as her parents' ketubah (Jewish marriage contract), which indicates that they were married as Jews in Budapest. But only three months before the wedding, she was informed by the Rabbinate that her Jewishness was being questioned.
Yad Vashem rules document is authentic
Yael turned to the Shorashim Center, which is affiliated with the Tzohar rabbinical organization and specializes in proving people's Jewishness, and the organization members began investigating her family history.
In Hungary, they managed to locate the original Swedish visa her grandmother received in 1944, which states that the person carrying it is about to become a Swedish citizen and is therefore entitled to the kingdom's protection from the Nazis. That year, the Germans began annihilating the Jews in Hungary, they ally.
Shorashim turned to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum for its opinion, and museum officials determined that the certificate was authentic, that it carried Wallenberg's original signature and that the visa had been delivered by him or by a messenger on his behalf to people in distress, mostly Jews.
They also presented an approval of protégés of the Swedish Embassy in Hungary for the grandmother's mother, whose maiden name was Spitzkopf. The passport pictures point to a great resemblance between the grandmother and her mother, and according to the Shorashim experts, to "a clear Jewish appearance" as well.
Yael also provided family photographs pointing to the connection between women of four generations of the family.
Sisters' Jewishness confirmed too
In order to complete the puzzle, the organization located in the Yad Vashem Archive a document from the population census of Budapest's Jews in 1941, in which the grandmother, who was born in 1932, was registered by her father: Ethnic affiliation - Jewish; religion - Jewish; citizenship - Hungarian.
Rabbi Shimon Har Shalom, director of the Shorashim Center, too the evidence to the Jewishness verification department at the Rabbinical Courts, and recommended recognizing Yael's Jewishness.
Last month, several days before the wedding, Rabbi Yigal Lerer of the Petah Tikva District Court ruled that "the applicant was born to Jewish parents and there is no halachic reason to prevent her from getting married according to Jewish Law."
On the same occasion, the rabbinical court also confirmed the Jewishness of Yael's two sisters, Noa and Moriah.
