While my father had traced his lineage in America back to the late 1800s, my mother’s side of the family was always a mystery. She would tell me stories about her parents, her grandmother, and her grandfather, Rabbi Dr. Adolf Kober, the last Head Rabbi of Cologne before the war. He became one of my heroes growing up.

I was especially moved by the fact that my mother had grown up just a few blocks from where we lived. It sparked my imagination to know that I was walking in the footsteps of my ancestors.

In 2016, I started building my mother’s family tree on Ancestry. I thought I might uncover a few names. What I found changed everything.

My great-grandfather had four siblings, three of whom survived the Holocaust. Each of them had children, and those children had families of their own. That meant I had living relatives. I reached out to some of them on Facebook. When they responded and told me they remembered my grandmother and great-grandparents from their visits to England, I cried tears of joy.

That moment connected so many threads. My mother had saved my grandmother’s old letters, but we had never known who they were addressed to. Now, I could finally put names, faces, and real people to those stories. We were stitching our family back together after decades apart.

That was just the beginning. Over the years, I continued growing the tree, uncovering more relatives and even helping connect family members who had no idea each other existed.

During this time, I took a heritage trip to Germany. I walked the streets my ancestors had lived on. I stood in front of homes where their names were once on the doors. I visited synagogues, cemeteries, and archives.

My goal was always to sew back together what had been torn apart by war, distance, and time. This journey reconnected me with the people and places that shaped my story. I want others to know that kind of discovery is possible.