Elana Milman, who grew up on a kibbutz in northern Israel, has spent her life on a quest to find her birth parents. Last year, she published an autobiography detailing this lifelong search. For most of her life, Milman believed she would never know the identity of her father.
Milman discovered the truth about her origins at the age of six when a friend revealed the “very big secret” he had heard: her mother and father were not her biological parents. Her birth certificate revealed that she was born Helena Lewinska to a Polish-Jewish woman named Franziska Lewinska in 1947 at the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp, located near the site of the former Nazi concentration camp of the same name.
Despite this knowledge, Milman faced many challenges in uncovering her true heritage. It wasn’t until this year, thanks to a DNA test and some serious “genealogical detective work,” that she made a breakthrough. Milman recently returned from Poland, where she had an emotional meeting with a brother she didn’t know existed until earlier this year.
The turning point in her search came when Gilad Japhet, founder and chief executive of the genealogy platform MyHeritage, read an article Milman wrote about her experience of not knowing her parents. Moved by her story, Japhet asked his research team, “Can we help?” Their subsequent research and a DNA test led Milman to finally find her long-lost family. Read the full story here.
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