At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Russian Empire experienced a large-scale Jewish exodus. By the 1920s, some two million Russian Jews had emigrated to America, Europe, and Eretz Israel. Thousands of families have been separated. Many had loved ones left in Russia whom they never saw again. And didn’t even know they existed.
Since 1998, the Am haZikaron Institute has been helping to restore lost family ties, finding separated relatives and organizing their reunions. Over many years of family history research, the institute has created a flexible and efficient system for finding relatives and has compiled a database of unique human stories. For many Holocaust survivors and their descendants today, this may be the last chance to find the relatives they have been desperately searching for all their lives.
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.