WWI-era photo reveals story about torn family of Jew, Christian

Marysia Galbraith, a Christian woman, from Alabama and Pini Doron, a Jewish man, from Israel discover their lost familial connection.

By DANIEL NISINMAN
WWI Australian Army 311 (photo credit: Wikipedia Commons)
WWI Australian Army 311
(photo credit: Wikipedia Commons)
Marysia Galbraith, 56, was born and raised in a Christian family in Alabama. Galbraith came across a picture on MyHeritage, an online genealogy platform containing over 12.5 billion records, completely by chance that completely changed her life.
The photo led her to Pini Doron, 75, who was looking to unearth his family past, according to PEOPLE.
Galbraith, a cultural anthropologist by profession, began exploring her family roots in 2011, some thirty years after discovering that both her mother and grandmother were originally Jewish.
However, the truth lay hidden for so many years because neither her mother nor grandmother wanted to dig up the past.
"I found this out by accident in my 20s, but never really pursued it because my mother and grandmother didn't want to talk about it," said Galbraith.
Despite her family's silence, Galbraith followed her researcher's instincts and began excavating her past in an attempt to discover the deeply buried origins of her family.
In the meantime, Pini Doron was diligently working on recreating his family tree, eventually putting it up on MyHeritage.
Doron's decision to place his family tree on the genealogy platform led to Galbraith to discover her Jewish heritage, as she accidentally saw some of her family members in Doron's tree, ultimately leading to the discovery that Doron's grandmother, Rachel Piwko Kolski and Galbraith's grandmother, Halina Piwko Bereda, were sisters who lost each other in the aftermath of World War I.
As it turns out, the Polish sisters were separated when each left to a different country: Rachel left to Israel and Halina to the United States.
It remained unclear, nonetheless, why the two sisters chose to leave to different locations.
"At that time, there was no telephone and some not-so-friendly relationships between them, but we didn't know why," Doron explained.
In the course of their mutual investigation, Galbraith and Doron found out that Galbraith's sister came to the US with a Christian man - suggesting that she rejected her Jewish identity.
"It wasn't just a rejection of religion, it was choosing the life that she wanted to live [...] I don't think that she really wanted to reject her family, but she was kicked out of her family for the choice that she made," Galbraith elaborated.
Interestingly enough, despite Halina's decision to turn her back on her Jewish background, she still kept faith with her sister by helping both her and her family to escape the Nazi-controlled Warsaw Ghetto by providing them with forged documents that allowed them to live on the Christian side of the city in relative safety.
Pini and Maryisa have organized many family reunions since the discovery of their mutual origins in Israel, Poland and New York. They met face-to-face in 2015 at Doron's home in Tel Aviv.


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