Holocaust survivors offered DNA tests to help find family
NEW YORK — For decades, Jackie Young had been searching.
Orphaned as an infant, he spent thefirst few years of his life in a Nazi internmentcamp in what is now the Czech Republic. After World War II he was taken to England, adopted andgiven a new name.
As an adult, he struggled to learn of his origins and his family. He had some scant information about his birth mother, who died in a concentration camp. But about his father? Nothing. Just a blank space on a birth certificate.
That changed earlier this year when genealogists were able to use a DNA sample to help find a name — and some relatives he never knew he had.
Having that answer to a lifelong question has been “amazing,” said Mr. Young, now 80 and living in London. It “opened the door that I thought would never get opened.”
Now there’s an effort underway to bring that possibility to other Holocaustsurvivors
and their children.
The New York-based Center for Jewish History is launching the DNA Reunion Project, offering DNA testing kits for free through an application on its website. For those who use the kits it is also offering a chanceto get some guidance on next
steps from the genealogists who workedwith Mr. Young.
Those genealogists, Jennifer Mendelsohn and Adina Newman, have been doing this kind of work over the last several years, and run a Facebook group about Jewish DNA and genetic genealogy.
The advent of DNA technology has opened up a new world of possibilities in addition to the paper trails and archives that Holocaust survivors and their descendants have used to learn about family connections severed by genocide, Ms. Newman said.
“There are times when people are separatedand they don’t even realize they’re separated. Maybe a name change occurred so they didn’t know to look for the other person,” she said. “There are cases that simply cannotbe solved without DNA.”
While interest in genealogy and family trees is widespread, there’s a particular poignancy in doing thiswork in a community where so many family ties have been ripped apart because of the Holocaust, Ms. Mendelsohn said.
Her earliest effort in this arena was for her husband’s grandmother, who had lost her mother in a concentration camp. That effort led to aunts and cousins that no one in her husband’sfamily had known about.
Her husband’s uncle, she said, called afterward and said, “You know, I’ve never seen a photograph of my grandmother. Now that I see photographs of her sisters, it’s so comforting to me. I can imagine what she look like.”
“How do you explain why that’s powerful? It just is. People had nothing. Their families were erased. And now we can bring them back a littlebit,” Ms. Mendelsohn said.
She and Ms. Newman take pains to emphasize that there are no guarantees. Doing the testing or searching archives doesn’t mean a guarantee of finding living relatives or new information.But it offers a chance.
They and the center are encouraging people to take that chance, especially as time passes and the numberof living survivors declines.
“Itreally is the last moment where these survivors can be given some modicum of justice,” said Gavriel Rosenfeld,president of the center.
“We feel the urgency of this,“Ms. Newman said. “I wanted to start yesterday, and that’s why it’s like, no time like the present.”