The New York-based Centre for Jewish History is launching a project offering Holocaust survivors DNA tests to help find family.
As reported in AP News, the DNA Reunion Project aims to identify family members of Holocaust survivors and their children. As part of the project, DNA testing kits are offered for free through an application on its website.
Gavriel Rosenfeld, president of the centre said '[We have] allocated an initial $40,000 for the DNA kits in this beginning pilot effort and expects to spend as much as $100,000 on them in the program's first year.'
Genealogists, Jennifer Mendelsohn and Dr Adina Newman run a Facebook group about Jewish DNA and genetic genealogy, and together helped Jackie Young learn the origins of his family.
Young spent the first few years of his life in a Nazi internment camp and after World War II he was taken to England, adopted and given a new name.
Mendelsohn and Dr Newman used a DNA sample to help find a name and some relatives he never knew he had.
'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,' Dr Newman said.
Young concluded: 'I've been wanting to know all my life… If I hadn't known what I do know now, I think I would still felt that my left arm or my right arm wasn't fully formed. Family is everything, it's the major pillar of life in humanity.'
