the emotional hearing
the emotional hearingSpokesperson, rabbinical council

The Jerusalem rabbinical court completed a touching procedure of returning a "lost Jewess" to her national roots along with the woman's mother and children - all descendants to Holocaust survivors.

The story begins with the woman's grandmother, who survived the inferno of WWII and immigrated to Israel together with her two-year-old daughter.

When she grew up, the daughter ended up falling in love with an Arab from Nazareth and converting to Islam. 20 years later, her daughter followed in her footsteps, also taking up the Muslim faith and marrying a local Arab. She, too, had a son along with two daughters.

More than 70 years later, the Holocaust survivor's great-granddaughters are all registered as Muslims and bear distinctly Muslim-sounding names. One of them, howerver, found herself in an abusive relationship and decided to return to her Jewish roots. She appealed to the Yad L'Achim anti-assimilation organization for help and was referred to the secretary of the Jerusalem rabbinate, Rabbi Moshe Biton.

A number of days before International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the 76-year-old grandmother arrived at the Jerusalem rabbinic court accompanied by her daughter and granddaughters, where they recalled their family saga. The great-grandmother was born Jewish and her maternal descendants were deemed Jewish as well. Since she had converted to a foreign faith, however, the family members were faced with a formal conversion procedure.

Head of the rabbinic court, Rabbi Freeman, who carried out an in-depth inspection of the great-grandmother's Jewish origins, pointed out the symbolic significance of the family's return to their family roots on the day commemorating the Jewish people's survival of the Nazis' concerted effort to annihilate the "Eternal nation."