In the classic fairy tale, Susan Roth is an orphan who discovered she is
really a princess
Hers is not a personal story, its a national one with what she hopes will be
political consequences
Roth, the daughter of two famous Yiddish actors, Pessah
Barstein and Lillian Lux. had something of an unusual child-hood filled with
theater performances. But otherwise, historically hers is a typical modern
Jewish American tale.
Her great-grandmother Rivkah Rabinovitch fled Eastern Europe
to America - Roth believes because of the pogroms telling her family little of
her past life and their roots.
That lack of knowledge made Roth feel like in historical
orphan.
"How can you know where you are going to if you don't
know where you have come from." Roth says.
Research she did as an adult for philosophical book she
wrote, 'Moses and the 20th Century,’ give her initial clues into her family
past, leading her to the conclusion that hers was a very ancient lineage - one
leading straight hack to King David.
Now Roth, of New Jersey and Jerusalem. and Eliyahu Peretz of
Jerusalem who similarly claims his descent from King David, are organising the
first-ever gathering of the descendants of King David in more than 2,000 years,
to be held in Jerusalem sometime in 2002.
According to Roth. there are tens of thousands of Jews who
can trace their ancestry to the Davidic line. More than 20.000 invitations to
the upcoming convention are in the process of being prepared from a data-base
compiled by Peretz, based on known genealogical information.
At the convention DNA samples will be taken from those in
attendance and tested. Research carried out a few years ago on male Cohens
descended from the Jewish priestly line of Aaron, revealed a mutation in the
y-chromosome in some 85 per cent of those tested, confirming the existence of a
single common ancestor. Roth hopes that similar dramatic findings will result
from testing the Davidic Royal line.
Proportionally only a few of the royalty lines are known, the
rest have been obscured by time. What is known is that 15 Jewish families have
traditionally claimed to have descended from King David, according to Peretz.
Twelve of those families trace themselves back to Rashi, who
believed he was descended from the marriage between King David and Hagis. The
families includes Abarhanel, Berdugo, Don Yehiya, Halperin. Harlap.
Horowitz. Katzenelbogen, Lurie, Rabinowitz, Shaltiel, Shapira and Weil.
His family Peretz, goes back to Solomon’s line from the
marriage of Batsheva and David, which is the messianic line. Two other families,
Dayan and Elfandari similarly come from Solomon,
Peretz says.
Initially, Peretz focused on his most immediate family line
of Peretz. He set up the Peretz Dynasty Non-Profit Association in 1997. The
group has grown to at least 6,000 local households and several hundred abroad.
Last year he organized a convention of the Peretz family with the help of Roth.
Now he and Roth are working on one of his others dreams -
bringing together the descendants of King David in the city David once ruled.
ROTH is the founder and CEO of SIR Associates, a
five-year-old publishing house specializing in spiritual titles, and the founder
of Eshet Chayil Foundation, which promotes projects that unify the Jewish people
in acts of love and kindness.
She is hoping that gathering the descendants of King David
will similarly help unify the Jewish people and cement their connection to the
Land of Israel.
King David and his descendants are significant because God
promises that the Kingdom of Israel will always be ruled by David and his
descendants, Roth says.
"Every royal house of Europe claims its right to be
royal by mere fact of being a descendant of the House of David Roth says.
The English royal family, the Windsor's now ruling England,
have a rock from the Temple Mount under their coronation seat to emphasize that
link, Roth says.
Through history, civilizations rose and fell, yet the Jewish
people survived. Now we are back in our country in Israel and Israel is still
being persecuted. We are still being told we have no right to be here, Roth
says.
Israel is not just a state, its a royal house. King David
bought the Temple Mount. His first kingdom was in Hebron for seven years. We are
the true inheritors of the royal crown,’ Roth says.
David ruled Jerusalem for 33 years. He built the city, which
is often referred to historically as the City of David.
‘We Jews have more right to claim royalty than any
of these European royal houses. I want to show that the blood of King David is
alive and well in Israel today. It will show that we are the rightful inheritors
of Israel:’ Roth says.
"Knowing you are a descendent of King David can change
your life,’ Roth states. She gives as a case in point a talk she gave
on the Royal house of David at the recent Conference of Presidents of Major
Jewish Organizations in Jerusalem. "At the end of my remarks, a young girl
from the US came up to me She was flush with excitement, She told me that her
name was one of the 15 and she wanted to know what she could do. I am sure that
knowing you belong to the Jewish royal family will inject pride and bring many
Jews back to their roots,"
.ROTH always fell a connection to King David. In September 1999 she published
the Golden Book of Psalms, the first fully-illuminated edition of the Psalms in
both Hebrew and English.
Roth traces her own lineage directly to King David through
several great rabbis, including the Ba’al Shem Toy, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov,
and the first Lubavitcher Rebbe Shneur V. Zalman of Ladi, Initially all she knew
was that her great-grandmother's grandfather or great-grandfather, Baruch
Shochet, was such a great man that when he died his entire hometown of Tiplik in
the Ukraine closed down.
As a piece of her research on Rabbi Nachman of Breslov for
her book Moses and the 20th Century, Roth saw a picture of his chair in a
book by Aryeh Kaplan. The inscription in the book says it was made by the
Shochet of Tiplik. The names in the family trees of Rabbi Nachman were familiar
to her as well.
It showed that the grandson of Shneur Zalman married the
daughter of Rabbi Nachman. The book says there was no offspring.
"I knew in my gut it wasn’t true." She hired a
professional genealogist and with the help of the Breslov community was able to
fill in the missing links to show that this was her family. Hem is the only
family related both to the BaI Shem Tov through Rabbi Nachman and Rabbi Shneur
Zalman,
After verifying that she is a descendant of Ray Nachman of
Breslov, she wanted to see the chair, which is housed in Jerusalem.
"They brought it to me in the women’s section. 1
looked at it and I started crying. I fell like I was with all of my ancestors,
It was like going to a kever (grave)."
Now she understands why she is so passionate about helping
the Jewish people.
Knowing her roots, that she is connected to these rabbis and
to King David, "It gives you a feeling of pride, it’s pride you can hand
down to your children. Once you know you are descendant of royalty, you have to
act in that manner, you have to raise your standards to a higher level, It
creates a whole new way of living," Roth says.
It’s not about feeling important, she nays. It is also a
very humbling experience.
As the daughter of actors and as a young actress, she was
often in the limelight growing up. She always hated the publicity. Her brother,
Mike Burstyn, who is still an actor loves it. All she wanted was to be a mother.
"I got married at age 19, walked out the door (of the theatre) and never
looked back."
"Destiny or fate will pull you onto your life path in
spite of what you want, and that is what is happening to me," Roth says.
