An Adoptee’s Dream Come True

By Esther

February 27, 2017

During the past five months, MyHeritage has been engaged in a special project in partnership with Israeli Member of Parliament Nurit Koren, to help family members who were separated in the 1940s and 1950s in Israel, to find each other and reconnect through the use of DNA. The project is one of MyHeritage’s pro bono initiatives and is being carried out at no cost to the participants, with the goal of reuniting families.

MyHeritage has provided free MyHeritage DNA tests for genetic testing to those families and adoptees who want to be tested. To date, we have tested 750 people as part of this project.

We recently saw this project bear one of its first fruits. Yehuda Kantor, an Israeli physicist, discovered in adulthood that he had been adopted as a baby, and he’d never been able to find his biological family — despite years of searching. A MyHeritage DNA test helped us bring about the moment of a lifetime when Kantor reconnected with his biological family.

Watch below the exciting story by investigative journalist Rina Matzliach that recently appeared on Israeli TV news (in Hebrew with English subtitles).

Yehuda Kantor’s case is so significant that it was discussed in the Knesset (Israeli parliament) before the Prime Minister. In the following segment, Member of Knesset Nurit Koren commends MyHeritage for establishing its DNA database to reunite families. The context is the excitement of discovering Kantor’s biological family through the MyHeritage DNA database. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also praises MyHeritage’s important project to reunite families through the use of DNA.