The Am haZikaron Institute considers one of its most important tasks to be the reunification of Jewish families. Between 1881 and 1921, two million Jews fled the Russian Empire to escape the pogroms. The ties of these future Israeli, American, Canadian, Latin American and other Jews with the relatives they left behind in Russia were destroyed by the (unspoken) ban on correspondence with relatives abroad in the USSR. Today, most Russian-speaking Jews have relatives in Jewish communities around the world. As to how many Jewish families were destroyed by the Holocaust, we can only speculate. Below is an account of a family who believed their own mother and grandmother perished in the Shoah. We were able to find that she survived and reunite the family. Another example is about the reunion of a Russian-speaking Israeli family with Latin American relatives lost behind the Iron Curtain.
Contact us. Perhaps we can help your family reunite as well.
Separated by the Holocaust
The Abraham family is Jakub
Wendy Abraham has spent more than 30 years searching for members of her grandfather’s family who remained in Europe during the Holocaust. She recently learned that the Am haZikaron Institute helps people to rebuild family ties. After contacting Am haZikaron, in less than a year Wendy was able to meet her great uncle and aunt, whom she had never seen before. This touching meeting took place in Israel. A family separated for more than 70 years has finally been reunited.
100 years of loneliness
The Kavlin family (Konstantinovs – Lederman)
One hundred years ago, in Polotsk, the Kavlina family was separated by war. WWI, occupation, civil war. Alberto ended up in Bolivia – after Lithuania, Germany, Holland. His sister Dina – in Kazan, after serving in the ranks of the Red Army. They were in their early twenties then, separated….. They never heard from each other again. Their children never learned that there were native people living on another continent. And only the grandchildren were able to meet. And talk. And let this conversation now require an interpreter. And let tens of thousands of kilometers separate the triple cousins – their family, huge again, together again – after a hundred years. And what was erased by the cruel history, full of blood, separations, persecutions and seemingly eternal oblivion, has been restored and will never be forgotten by descendants. Anatoly Konstantinov met with Lydia Lederman in Tel Aviv.