What a young Jewish man from Austria would meet his future wife, a young Jewish woman from Czechoslovakia, on a beach in the Holy Land is testimony to the power of 2,000 years of hope, faith and endurance on the part of Jews in the Diaspora.

Talking about what it means to be Jewish almost requires going back two millennia, to 70 C.E. (the Common Era) when the Romans captured Jerusalem, destroyed the Jews' temple and began to expel them from the Land of Israel.

By about the fifth century, Jews were permitted to enter Jerusalem only one day a year, on Tisha b'Av, the anniversary of the destruction of the temple. They spent that day in prayer at the only remnant of the temple remaining -- the western retaining wall. Their woeful prayers led non-Jews to refer to it as the "Wailing Wall" from that time on.

In all the centuries since, the vast majority of Jews have lived outside the land of their ancestors, exiled all over the map. But they never forgot they were Jews.

From the 19th century onward, propelled by Zionism, then by the forces of war and dislocation, they returned to what they considered their homeland in trickles, in waves and, eventually, in a flood.

The first of Naomi Weiss' extended family to arrive in Palestine was Walter Fuchs, an engineer. The family does not have to look far to find signs of his presence. His touch is in the port of Tel Aviv, on roads and bridges, and in the network of aqueducts that still snakes nearly the length of Israel, transporting water from the Sea of Galilee to make the deserts in the south bloom.

"I like to say the history of my father is the history of Israel in the 20th century," said Ruth Or, a judge today in Jerusalem and Gerda Weiss' cousin. "He lived from 1901 to 1991 and almost every big construction job in Israel has his fingerprints on it."

Fuchs immigrated to Palestine in 1936, a year before his wife, Evi, and daughter. Like so many in the family, he left Czechoslovakia when the Nazis were harassing Jews but not yet sending them to labor camps or death factories.

A construction engineer, he went to work immediately helping to build Tel Aviv's port.

In a letter to his family dated May 31, 1936, he sent a picture of "the first Jewish port in the world."

Fuchs became deputy manager for the British public-works department in Palestine and helped build bridges and roads all over the country. Later, he became a professor at the Technion, a technological institute founded by the Zionists in 1924.

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