.

Hidden Roots, a personal living website, is an ongoing narrative that tells two remarkable, interwoven stories. Each story unfolds as we write. 

Betty searches for - and may soon find - the people and organizations who took her to safety in the lovely, isolated French village of Dullin.

David, in Jerusalem, studies the unfinished autobiography of an ancestor who came to the Holy Land in the 1880's to build one of the most interesting and important synagogues in Jerusalem, Rabbi Yehuda Hahasid, the "Hurva."  We explore this story from the point at which yet another predecessor, Yehuda Leib Eppel, leaves a tantalizing fragment of his autobiography - for us and the generations to come. Incomplete when he died, the autobiography will be continued on these and subsequent pages, as a website and in print. The “spark” he describes – a key element of our hidden roots – reflects the glimmer of Israel’s renaissance.

In each case, the Hidden Roots story begins at a particular moment, dramatic pivotal, and historical. 

The Germans have invaded and occupied France, the Jewish population is being rounded up and deported to the concentration camps, Betty's father and mother, torn asunder by an inhuman choice, make a momentous, fateful and horrendous decision. 

Tragically and inevitably, it means life and death - death for two, life for three.

As we shall see in this narrative, escape, rescue and safe sanctuary in the French mountains shapes Betty's character, attitude to life and personality.

David, who lives with the "spark" of Israel's rebirth as described by Yehuda Leib Eppel, finds the building, documents and artifacts from the Hurva synagogue, where his ancestral roots were planted 145 years ago. 

Under the light and shadow of both narratives, David and Betty explore the past, discover the present and contemplate the future.

In essence and reality, the two stories combine in the same Jerusalem home. In one corner is Victor's key, his antique family clock is in another and facing them, in bold, tacit admiration and rapport - is Isaac Eppel, the educator who understood what could and would happen.

Two stories, two roots, the search and the discovery. 

This is not only a record of the dark, recent past in Europe; it is an expression of our sincere hope for and faith in the future, exemplified by our own children and grandchildren.

In this momentous context, we - in our own way - are part of a large contemporary world-wide effort to tell the story and recall personal Holocaust experiences before the eye witnesses have gone and - so we suspect - few in future generations will believe it could have happened the way it happened. 

Even we – who were there – find it hard, indeed virtually impossible, to believe.

For the eye witnesses, as for the historians, scholars and moral humanity everywhere, these events are incomprehensible.

The more one learns, the more information one gathers, the greater the appalling disbelief. Were these things really done in our time? Tell it to your childrem and their children, the prophet said.

All over the world people of our generation, the hidden children and their families, are still searching, for their parents, their real names and identity - some do not know who they are - and their rescuers.

By telling our story, we trust  the world will learn that it must never happen again, that the first signs of hatred of others, racism in any form and anti-Semitism must be exposed in all its foreboding, virulent transparency and nipped in the bud.

Hidden roots must not sprout into weeds, irrigated, as they were, by German fanatical hatred.

Children, everywhere, must express, not conceal or deny their identity. The action taken to help them, in most cases, was too little, too late. Bystanders, who saw it happen, were invariably and pathetically indifferent.

This is a living memorial, because both stories live on and Hidden Roots will be developed and updated from time to time. Fresh information will be added as it is researched, verified and becomes available and pertinent.

In France, extraordinary people - some were Jewish Scouts who took to the fields,  forests and byways they knew so well to escort children to safety - are helping Betty in her search for the "missing links' - the unlikely heroes who ignored very real dangers and at great personal risk took action when others turned their backs.

In most cases, they are now elderly people who remember and still strive to create and rebuild.
 
One woman in our story did not realize at the time that she and Betty lived in the same village; a man, posing as a casual farm worker, did not know that the little peasant in the fields was a Jew; another woman helps us reconstruct the secret networks and survival organizations. Others tell us their tales, so modestly, so courageously, so momentously.

At the same time, in Jerusalem, David returns, on these pages, to the Hurva synagogue and from it back to Edinburgh and Lithuania, where Zionism, as we now know it, took root.

Our conviction is that by means of modern technology - the Internet - the lessons of Hidden Roots can remind nations of the world that courage, as shown by Victor and Josephine Guicherd can prevail over evil, as shown by the Germans in World War Two, and that humanity will never allow it to happen again.
 
We shall see how one man in our story - Isaac Eppel - issued a warning on time. It was ignored. He saw the signs twenty two years and more earlier. When it - the Holocaust - happened in another part of Europe, Victor Guicherd, a simple farmer, rose to accept the challenge, at enormous personal risk. The two men, Isaac and Victor, the rescuer and the visionary, who form an essential part of our hidden roots narrative, would have understood, admired and enjoyed the company of one another. They shared similar human values and acted when and where others feared to tread.

Hidden Roots should be perceived as incomplete at this stage but continuous and, we hope, everlasting for the message it carries.

The Hurva story, on which we are also working, reveals an historical aspect that runs very close to and parallel with the events in France.  Zionist pioneer Isaac Eppel, the Hebrew teacher and scholar, who understood what would happen and issued his warning to others, lived long enough to see his vision of Israel, the nation and the state, fulfilled.  His portrait, drawn in his Edinburgh study, hangs in the Eppel home - on a wall facing the very same clock that chimed the hour as Betty climbed up the steep hill to the little house in Dullin. The portrait and the clock symbolize two dreams, two hidden roots and the epic point at which they meet.