When I played with my friends in the yard on Shabbat, I remember my father calling me to

come up and study with him, the Gamerah, the Talmud.

It was very important for him to give us a sound Jewish scholarly basis foundation.

Hey, Amishi Harman, and this is Israel Story.

Israel Story is brought to you by the Jerusalem Foundation and the Times of Israel.

So Israel is turning 75, and we feel this is a moment for us to step back and take stock.

To ask where we came from, where we are, and where for God's sake we're going.

And in order to answer those questions, we decided to go back to the basics.

Our series, Signed, Sealed, Delivered, looks at our founding moral compass,

Megilatatsmot, or the Declaration of Independence.

37 people sign Megilatatsmot, and over the course of the past several months,

our team has diligently tracked down the closest living relative of each one of these signatories and interviewed them.

We talked about their ancestors and families, about the promise of the Declaration,

the places in which we delivered on that promise, the places in which we exceeded our wildest dreams,

and also about the places where we fell short.

And it is through these descendants of the men and women, who, with a strike of a pen,

gave birth to this country of ours, that we wish to learn something about ourselves.

That's Immanuel Valhaftig, Lainey, or chanting, the Declaration of Independence

using the melody of Torah readings.

His father, Zorach, or as most people, including the official Knesset website, called him Zerach,

was an important leader of the Mafdal, the national religious party,

in the last of the signatories to arrive in the land of Israel.

...