After 80 years, family members of brothers from Belarus, who were separated from each other before World War II and were no longer able to meet due to the Iron Curtain that separated them, were reunited.
One of the brothers, Shabtai Baskin, a Zionist activist who was in a Soviet prison, escaped with the German invasion of the Soviet Union to the east. As a radio amateur, he picked up broadcasts reporting on the killing of Jews in the occupied areas.
At the end of the war, he immigrated to Israel, without knowing what happened to his family members who remained in Belarus - and whether they survived the Holocaust. Attempts to find information about them after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1980s also failed.
Want more news, videos and stories? Join the Haredim 10 WhatsApp channel >>
Baskin's grandson, Rani Markowitz, took on the task of reuniting the family and turned to the high-tech company MyHeritage, which manages the world's largest database with 32 million family trees.
A search of the databases found nothing.
However, the company hired a professional genealogist in Belarus, who delved into the archives and managed to find KGB documents and letters from family members that had been waiting for nearly a century in the basements.
The investigation revealed that the wife of one of the brothers and her daughter survived World War II and emigrated to the United States afterward - and that the lost relatives currently live in Indiana.
Following the revelations, family members traveled to the United States for a historic reunion.
