Israel

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This page is about the country of Israel specifically, and the Jewish people in general.

[edit] Language

English is fairly widespread in Israel, especially among the younger generation, but a large part of the nation only speaks Hebrew. Hebrew is written right-to-left, and uses a special alphabet.

A major difference from English is the use of Male/Female nouns and verbs alterations. Hebrew is more similar to some European languages in this matter that approaching anyone or anything is differentiated whether it's a he or a she. Like: Die,Das and Dar in German.

This is a difference that should be noted in the translation pages, since a sentence will look different if it's for a male user or a female user.

[edit] Internet availability

High-speed Internet is very common in Israel, and it is frequently used. Israeli sites tend to be slightly behind on the recent technologies (for example, Facebook still didn't quite catch, but blogging is very popular). Israeli sites are all in Hebrew.

[edit] Other things to consider

Certain Jewish records are kept in the Hebrew calendar, which uses letters instead of numbers. The "modern" form is a fixed arithmetic lunisolar calendar. Because of the roughly 11 day difference between twelve lunar months and one solar year, the calendar repeats in a Metonic 19-year cycle of 235 lunar months, with an extra lunar month added once every two or three years, for a total of 7 times per 19 years. As the Hebrew calendar was developed in the region east of the Mediterranean Sea, references to seasons reflect the times and climate of the Northern Hemisphere.

In Jewish culture, it is customary to commemorate the death of a relative according to the date of the Hebrew calendar which means that the date fluctuates year after year. Also, a new date on the Hebrew calendar does not begin at 12:00am, but at sunset as calculated by the rabbinic authories (this is something to add to the calendar on Geni).

Valued information about people:

• Rabbis: Books that were written by them, cities where they presided
• IDF Soldiers KIA or MIA: Operation this happened
• Holocaust survivors: what camps they went through.

[edit] Jewish Names / Surnames

Most Jewish surnames were only assigned to the Jewish communities of Europe less than 200 years ago by the authorities. Many Ashkenazic (European) surnames are derived from Yiddish, Polish, German, Russian and other local languages. Due to the dispersement of the Jews and the different languages used to create the surnames, Jewish genealogist use a variation soundex search called the Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex (D-M Soundex). Jewish surnames, depending on the dialect of Yiddish used in a region, could have vowel and consonant replacements and local languages would transliterate these surnames differently, and using D-M soundex reduces the chances that surname will not be found due to a different spelling. After Catherine the Great's decree, Jews were forced to live in the Pale of Settlement which includes today countries like Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and many other eastern European countries. This usually makes searching for relatives fairly difficult. When searching for your family ancestors, you would like to consider searching for 5,6 and even more variations of your surname. Option to add multiple names will have special value here - Hebrew (in use in Israel), English (in use by non-Israeli relatives) and Russian or Yiddish (to preserve the original one) for the same person.

First names are mostly transliterated, which makes for a lot of multiple spellings using the Latin alphabet (consider Isaac, Yitschak, Yitshak, Aizek and more for the same name יצחק). This means when you implement tree merging with Hebrew names you should check for the Hebrew spelling and have different fields for English and Hebrew names.

[edit] Interest in genealogy

Genealogy has always been important to the Jewish people, and some families have kept good records of their lineage. The records are mostly of paternal lineage or else of connections to important scholars. Also some have lost their ספרי יוחסין (Sifrei Yuchasin - Books of lineage) over the generations but have kept passing the important names in oral form to the coming generations, creating an oral tradition saying that Ancestor X is descended from Rabbi Y who is known to have descended from King David, for example. The great scholar, Rabbi Hillel, had proven to the Rabbis of his time that he was a direct descendant of King David. So, if any modern genealogist could prove a direct connection to Rabbi Hillel, they could then prove a connection to King David.

Unlike most of the people around the world who can trace their family history through existing local records, the Jewish-Israeli society mostly rely on their own family's memories when it comes to each family's personal roots. Most of the Jewish-Israelis came from Europe from small Jewish communities (Shtetls) where they lived their modest simple lives usually separately from the rest of European society, which is why after the Holocaust, when entire families were destroyed, leaving no oral history, it became hard to find any records of past ancestors/families as most of them had been destroyed. Many of the Holocaust survivors who came to Israel had such a trauma from the war that they decided not to talk about the past with their descendants... and that's why in a lot of cases the Holocaust survivors are taking their "family knowledge" with them to the grave.

In the last 2-3 decades the Jewish Israeli society acknowledged that problem and in an attempt to get as much of the family knowledge of the Jewish-Israeli citizens written down before it vanishes with the elderly population, it was decided in the education system that the all the 12 year old students would be given a school project when they reach the 7th grade for which they would be graded on to write down their family history and interview their living ancestors. Most of those school projects are written down with the help of the parents and continue to serve as the main source of family knowledge for many years later.

The Holocaust has left many Jewish families separated from their relatives and their illustrious past. Attempts are often made to reconnect with lost relatives.

• Israel Genealogical Society is Israel's premiere genealogical organization.
• JewishGen maintains a large database of Jewish family trees, with the distant goal of creating a family tree of all Jewish people.
• Yad Va Shem (Hand and Name) is a large database of the victims of the Holocaust.

[edit] Date Format

Israel like many other Middle Eastern countries, only uses 1 date format.

• Day, Month, Year (DD/MM/YY or DD/MM/YYYY)

Israel also has the Jewish Calendar which does not conform to the DD/MM/YYYY format. It's a 12 (13) months calendar, with Hebrew letters for specifying the day in month and the year.

[edit] Geni Translation

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