Lost Brothers Unite in Shul

By Steve Lipman, Chabad.org

At the start of Chabad-Lubavitch of Rego Park’s recent Yom Kippur evening services, Rabbi Eli Blokh asked two men to hold the Torah scrolls in front of the ark as a visiting cantor chanted Kol Nidre.

Beaming, the men sitting side-by-side in one row of seats stood up and walked to the front of the Queens, N.Y., synagogue; across from each other, they hugged the scrolls to their chests.

One of the men receiving the honor was a familiar face in the congregation, many of whose members are émigrés from the former Soviet Union. Gregory Solomon, a native of Ukraine who moved to the United States three decades ago, attends many Chabad activities.

The other man was a stranger.

The two, Blokh said in a brief introduction, are brothers who had recently been reunited after some 60 years apart.

Technically, Solomon and Meir Jakubovski are half-brothers, born to the same father and different mothers; and they were not reunited, since they had never known each other before coming together for the first time last year.

Before that, they were strangers to each other.

Jakubovski lives in Israel, where he made a new life after World War II. Both lost many relatives in the Holocaust.

Their story, though particularly dramatic, is typical of Jewish families separated by the corrosive effects of Nazism and Communism.

“It’s a microcosm,” says Blokh, a native of Moscow, of his community’s “search to find living connections.”

Now family again — Solomon is 67, Jakubovski, 73, both self-described “traditional” Jews — the men have kept in constant contact since finding each other with an Israeli cousin’s help. They talk on Skype once a week, and Solomon and his wife Sima went to Israel for 18 days in May.

Jakubovski and his wife Yehudit are staying with the Solomons in Forest Hills, Queens, on a two-month-long vacation. Like old friends, the men banter in Russian and English, Hebrew and Yiddish, interrupting one another and finishing each other’s sentences. At a wall-mounted collage of combined family photographs, they point to decades-old pictures of each other that show a great physical resemblance.

Jakubovski sounds just like the father of whom he has no memory, Solomon says.

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