JGS Lecture: "Suddenly Jewish" with Roma Baran

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The Jewish Genealogical Society of Montreal lecture on “Suddenly Jewish – A Mid-Life Discovery of her Jewish Roots” with Roma Baran. In August 2008, Roma Baran received a stunning email from a Jewish genealogist looking for heirs to a small estate of a Holocaust survivor, her father’s cousin, and learned that her casually Christian parents, and the whole rest of her family were not Polish Catholics, but Jews, including a rabbi and a Warsaw ghetto leader, and that her parents had survived the Holocaust under assumed names. She learned that not only were her family’s names and identities false, but that she had actually lived in Israel from 1949-1951. She tells of how she reconstructed her past over the last two years and describes the emotional consequences of this staggering discovery.