20 September 2006
Two siblings have been reunited more than six decades after the Holocaust, thanks to Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names. Hilda (Glasberg) Shlick, of Ashdod, Israel, always believed that her entire family, except for one sister, was killed in the Holocaust. Recently, her grandchildren conducted a search on the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names for information on their grandmother and were surprised to find a page of testimony filled out in Hilda’s memory by someone who wrote that he was her brother. They were then able to track down their grandmother’s two brothers who still live in Canada. Simon Glasberg, of Ottawa, Canada, has now arrived in Israel to reunite with his long lost sister and spend Rosh Hashanah together. Their brother Mark lives in Montreal, but was too ill to travel to Israel. During an appearance by the family in front of dozens of reporters at Yad Vashem on Monday, Hilda appeared overwhelmed. While her brother Simon freely recounted the family story in English, not ceasing to hug his sister, Hilda spoke haltingly and softly in Russian. The two siblings speak to each other in Yiddish. "My dream is to now go to Canada to see my other brother Mark, who is very sick, and to see my parents' graves," she said. The Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names contains some 3 million names of Holocaust victims, 2 million of the names come from pages of testimony, and the remainder are from archival lists. Available at www.yadvashem.org, over 10 million people have visited the website since the database went online in November 2004.
