by dan pine
staff writer
Joe Sorger thinks most of his Polish-born father’s family perished in the Holocaust, their ashes scattered to the four winds.
But maybe some distant cousins survived, their descendants now living somewhere: Europe? America? Israel?
Until now, the San Jose resident had no way to track them down. But with the launch of the DNA Shoah Project, doors Sorger could never have imagined may soon open. Not only does the technology exist to find living relatives, it may even help find the dead.
“The primary purpose [of the project] is to help those living today find family they do not know of because of the Holocaust,” says New York-based geneticist and project director Syd Mandelbaum. “With advances in technology, we have the capacity to establish a DNA database.”
Launched by Mandelbaum and two other top Jewish American geneticists, the DNA Shoah Project seeks to establish a genetic database of as many Holocaust survivors as possible. And if survivors can’t participate, their children and grandchildren can contribute their own DNA.
The DNA Shoah Project kicked off its inaugural event in August at the Levy Family Community Campus, part of the Addison-Penzak Jewish Community Center in Los Gatos. More than 200 people showed up, including 80 survivors, their children and grandchildren. With a simple cheek swab, each person donated their DNA to the database and helped the project achieve its goals.
That database may not only help family members reunite. In an advance that sounds more science fiction than science, future researchers also may be able to identify the remains of long dead Holocaust victims.
“There are hundreds of mass graves all over Europe,” says Mandelbaum, himself the son of two survivors. “With a DNA database people can give Jewish burials to their ancestors.”
Mandelbaum says this technology would allow scientists to recover partial DNA from the dead buried in those graves — DNA that can be used to find possible matches in the database.
But to make those matches would require a much larger database than the one currently in place. Mandelbaum does not expect any mass disinterment to take place soon. He believes it can be done decades, even centuries, after the Holocaust.
“Why have the Nazis continually victimizing us through history, when we can use tools like this to build a Jewish generation that was taken away from us?” he asks.
For Sorger, the DNA Shoah Project is personal.
When his father, Samuel, died in 1990 at age 66, he left behind unanswered questions about his family. Joe Sorger learned that as youths his father and uncle hid from the Nazis in the woods near Obertyn, Poland. The two ran into a non-Jewish friend who warned them German soldiers were rounding up Jews at the bottom of the hill.
The two brothers were suspicious. Sorger’s brother went up the hill while Samuel Sorger went down. The friend had lied; Sorger’s brother was never seen again, while Samuel rode out the war, hidden by Righteous Gentiles.
Joe Sorger was born in Poland after the war in a displaced persons camp in Germany. When he was a toddler, the family made its way to America. Sorger grew up in New York City.
The impact of the Holocaust never left him. Years later, living in San Jose, he launched the South Bay Holocaust Survivors Group, which provides activities and a vital social outlet for local survivors, who today number about 80. “Only survivors can talk to each other about their experiences,” he says. “We fill a void in our community.”
For the DNA project, Mandelbaum teamed up with geneticists Michael Hammer and Howard Cash. Although a Tucson genetics lab is donating its services, the costs are great. “The next step is to raise money,” Mandlebaum says. “I need to find donors because so many survivors are indigent.”
Mandelbaum was delighted with the Los Gatos event, which he says was an excellent first step. Sorger, too, couldn’t have been happier.
“Anyone who looks at ‘CSI’ would get it,” he says, “The survivors know to get DNA you swab the inner cheek. The rest is magic.”
For more information on the DNA Shoah Project, visit www.dnashoah.info.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California