Your Daily Phil: Gideon Taylor on antisemitism and Holocaust ed + AI and philanthropy | CPT PPP Coverage

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Good Wednesday morning!

In today’s Your Daily Phil, we interview JCRC-NY’s Gideon Taylor, and feature op-eds by Jamie Geller and Noach Levin on AI and philanthropy, and by JEP’s Samantha Vinokor-Meinrath on fighting antisemitism. Also in this newsletter: Lily Ebert, Annie Keith and Katie Couric. We’ll start with a project to help Holocaust survivors locate their long-lost relatives.

When people think of the increasingly popular trend of DNA testing, they may picture the breakdown of ancestry that, for example, might tell someone they’re 99.9% Ashkenazi Jewish. But a new project by genealogists Jennifer Mendelsohn and Adina Newman is using DNA test kits for a different purpose — mapping out the relatives of Holocaust survivors — and they just got some crucial help from Ancestry, a leading provider of the kits.

Ancestry has given Mendelsohn and Newman’s initiative, called the DNA Reunion Project, 2,500 DNA test kits, at a total estimated value of $250,000. The project, which launched in November and is housed at the Center for Jewish History in New York City, distributes free DNA testing kits to survivors and their children. The results of those tests include lists of people with whom the person shares DNA. Mendelsohn and Newman can use those lists, in combination with other sources like marriage and birth records, to find survivors’ long-lost family members.

Using the results, the pair have identified the parents of child survivors, or helped locate a distant living relative. Mendelsohn is a journalist and Newman has a doctorate in education; both have been working as genealogists in recent years and have expertise in reconstructing Jewish family trees.

“The Holocaust created many situations where the paper trail is either disrupted, severed, problematic, and DNA can answer those questions,” Mendelsohn told eJewishPhilanthropy. “When there’s a match between what you’re seeing in DNA and what you’re seeing in records, that is pretty ironclad.”

Tracing Jewish genealogy can be especially difficult, she said, because of endogamy and a dearth of records. “Basically, on paper Jewish often look more closely related than they really are, and Jewish tend to share DNA with other Jewish to whom they are not really meaningfully related,” Mendelsohn said. “The records are not as easily accessible. You have to know which archives to hit up in Eastern Europe.”

Since the beginning of the project, Mendelsohn and Newman have distributed some 100 testing kits, but have 800 requests pending. Mendelsohn is not aware of any previous effort like this that has used commercial DNA tests, and said the work is particularly urgent now as the survivor population dwindles.

“Our pie-in-the-sky ideal goal is to connect people, possibly, to living relatives who survived who they didn’t know survived or who they just didn’t know, but this process of testing can also just help people build their trees back further,” Mendelsohn told eJP. “It empowers people to take back their history, which was wiped away from us.”