Shalom Korai stood alone in a burning Jewish ghetto in Poland. A policeman scooped the toddler up and took him to safety. That was 1943. This summer, Korai deplaned in South Carolina—to the first hug from a blood relative that he ever remembers.
Sin fills the world with sorrow. Yet the Bible calls God a “Father of the fatherless and protector of widows.” (Psalm 68:5) Korai’s story is ultimately a story of hope.
A very young Korai ended up in a Jewish boarding school in Poland and later, in France. In 1949, he was sent to the newly established state of Israel. Korai didn’t know his given name or birthdate. “I didn’t even know the concept of parents,” he told genealogy company MyHeritage.
Last summer, MyHeritage offered DNA testing for Korai and other Holocaust orphans. He had never searched for relatives because “you can’t go looking for something if you don’t know what you want to find,” Korai told MyHeritage.
A few months later, Ann Meddin Hellman got a ping from a DNA sample she’d given while researching her family tree. She had a second cousin.
Korai’s name and other information were unfamiliar to her. So Hellman requested a photo from MyHeritage. She remembers gasping. Korai looked just like her brother.
“The picture gave it away,” Hellman says.
Hellman’s and Korai’s grandfathers were brothers. Before World War II,Hellman’s ancestors immigrated to America. Korai’s family stayed behind.
Hellman says her family knew “forever” that her great uncle’s family was killed during the Holocaust. Now she learns there was a survivor.
“I feel like I’ve given somebody a new life,” Hellman says of her newfound cousin.
The second cousins have spoken often since the DNA breakthrough, in letters and on video calls.
“All this family that he was always praying for came to him just like that,” says Daniel Horowitz, a genealogist at MyHeritage.
Some mysteries remain. “I haven’t been able to find his parents’ names. That upsets me the most,” Hellman says.
In July, more than a dozen relatives—Hellman, her brother and sister, the sister’s husband and sons, a niece, sister-in-law, and cousins—came to the airport to celebrate their new relative.
Korai is shy and quiet. But he smiles as each hugs him. In quieter moments, he looks them over.
“He’ll get to see himself in them in a way he has never gotten to see himself before,” Hellman says. “And we get to give a family to someone who never thought one existed.”
Why? Father God assures His children of continual grace to live without dependence on our circumstances. Yet that same God puts most of us in families and calls us to care for the fatherless and widows.
