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This Holocaust survivor rediscovered her Jewish roots decades later—thanks to a Canadian genealogist

JL;DR SUMMARY Jewish genealogist Stanley Diamond helped uncover the true identity of Maria Vasitinskaya, born Rivka Silber, who was left in a ditch during the Holocaust and raised as a Christian, by connecting her with her surviving Jewish relatives decades later. A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski.

  • At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself.
  • This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude.
  • Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from.
  • But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
  • And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.
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Tags

HolocaustJewish IdentityPolandFamily ReunificationSurvivor StoriesGenealogyJewish GenealogyDna TestingStanley DiamondIdentity Discovery

Places mentioned

Krosno, Subcarpathia, Poland
"In 1942, the Nazis were rounding up her parents and two older children in the Polish town of Krosno."
Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russian Federation
"Eventually, the girl's father sent her to live in Siberia, where Maria had a hard life."
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
"Par for the course for Diamond, the founder with his wife of an important database of over 6.5 million vital records of Jews in Poland."
Israel
"Nearly 20 years ago, when Maria paid a visit to Yad Vashem in Israel, she decided to start looking for her true identity."
This podcast episode was indexed and curated by Cairo, JL;DR's web crawler.
Cairo Item ID 47671
Cairo Source ID 72
Retrieved 2025-03-28 05:30:45 UTC
Curated 2025-03-28 06:02:50 UTC