Uncovering hidden Jewish roots

This Passover, Leah Diaz-Oben, 54, of Jacksonville, Florida, recalls her family's flight from Cuba in 1962, and her recent discovery of her Jewish heritage. She plans to help others do the same.

"As we were preparing to go, my grandmother said, 'Just remember the Jewish people, how they had to go from place to place at a moment's notice,' " Diaz-Oben said.

But she was unaware of her family's Jewish roots at the time "and I wasn't even sure who the Jewish people were," she said.

That changed in 2004, when Diaz-Oben's genealogy research uncovered Jewish roots on both sides of her family. She learned they had stopped practicing Judaism, and in some cases converted to Catholicism, because of persecution in Spain during the Spanish Inquisition and later in the Caribbean."

I'm always looking for stories like this because it means there are so many people out there searching for roots. Fortunately, there are some rabbis who are welcoming.

"Experts say more and more Jews are having epiphanies like Diaz-Oben's.

"A lot of people are discovering they had Jewish roots but never knew it before," said Rabbi Holly Levin Cohn at Congregation Ahavath Chesed in Mandarin.

Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, president of the New York-based National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, a think tank on Jewish issues, estimates up to 25 percent of the world's 12 million to 15 million Jews are Sephardic, meaning they descend from ancestors who fled Spain and Portugal during the Inquisition ... .

Because many Jews converted to Catholicism or went underground, often their modern descendants are unaware of their own Jewish identity, Hirschfield said."

Diaz-Oben attends Levin Cohn's synagogue and is converting. She plans to launch a Web site and blog aimed at helping others to re-discover their roots.

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