Family Secrets, Jewish-Christian Relations and the Holocaust

Speakers: Professor Katharina von Kellenbach, Pastor Heidi Neumark Professor Katharina von Kellenbach and Pastor Heidi Neumark are Lutheran theologians, whose families carefully disguised their connections to Jews and Judaism. Both families tried to rebuild lives by disassociating and denying the trauma and guilt of the Holocaust. Neumark accidentally discovered that she was descended from a prominent Jewish German family and that her grandfather was murdered in a concentration camp. Von Kellenbach became inadvertently aware that her uncle belonged to the SS and was tried for the mass murder of the Jews in Pinsk, Belarus. These revelations compelled both speakers to go ...

DNA Leads an Adopted Daughter to her Birth Mother: Kelly's Story

Speakers: Kelly Moore, Karen Franklin Kelly Moore was raised in Albany, New York. A Catholic child, she was told at an early age that she was adopted. In her mid-twenties, she started the search for her birth parents. A simple FamilyTreeDNA test yielded surprising results – she had many Jewish matches, and one extremely close match to Jon Stedman. Kelly got in touch with Karen Franklin, the contact on FamilyTreeDNA. Jon had died five years earlier, but Karen had uploaded the DNA. Karen was able to provide Jon’s research tracing their German Jewish family history back to mid 18th century. In ...