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2011 Rockower Award for Excellence in Personality Profiles (American Jewish Press Association)
"Omri Casspi: Our Man in Sacramento"
"Seeking Kin" is a concept I launched as a syndicated column in August 2011. "Seeking Kin" presents riveting tales of people hoping to locate long-lost friends, relatives and acquaintances -- people they knew well or crossed paths with briefly. Each feature story presents the circumstances behind a subject's search. These stories aim to inform and bring reading pleasure as human connections and historical contexts are explored.
The stories hold out even greater promise. "Seeking Kin" enables -- and relies on -- readers to be part of the solution, to assist the subject in reuniting with someone important to him or her. One name, one clue, one date mentioned in a story might be crucial to a reader's unlocking the solution. Because "six degrees of separation" truly binds people globally, we all have roles to play along that chain. Together, we can help people close circles, heal old wounds, fill holes in their past and achieve comfort and satisfaction with those they once knew -- and would like to know again. Some mysteries are even solved before publication.
Several readers -- and the stories' subjects themselves -- have deemed the "Seeking Kin" project "holy work." That sentiment is gratifying to know.
• elderly man seeks American cousins
• woman seeks family of mom's ex-fiancee'
• reunion of WWII partisan fighters
• man reprieved from Auschwitz gas chamber
• identifying children who survived the Shoah
• could author's cousins be in Argentina?
• man seeks his almost-stepbrother/sister
• Lithuanian rescuer meets woman she saved
• FOUND: elderly man's American cousin
• Slovakian man seeks honor for rescuer-dad
• little-known 1941 Cyprus-Israel-Africa trip
• Wurzburg beckons native sons/daughters
• professor hunts for late composers' scores
• Ohio man looking for his half-siblings
• Righteous Gentile who's buried in Israel
• Ethiopia native honors man from Poland
• unit locates graves of Israeli war dead
• organization bridging secular-religious gap
• U.S. veterans who "saved" South Korea
• maharajah who sheltered WWII orphans
• legendary radio show that reunites families
• FOUND: saved Vietnamese 'boat people'
• delivering a letter to a fallen soldier's family
• FOUND: American first-grader, 57 years later
• FOUND: U.S.-born paratrooper, 40 years later
• FOUND: Vienna schoolboy friend, 73 years later
• FOUND: 1950s-era boyfriend and girlfriend
• at-risk-youth program seeks boy for reunion
• reunion of U.S. soldiers and Holocaust survivors
• woman seeks other child survivors of Holocaust
• returning a girl's 1963 notebooks
• woman seeks soldier's relatives
• honoring U.S. soldiers who recovered WWII art
• girl whom soldier helped
• FOUND: column reunites Australian cousins
• reunion of Tel Aviv classmates from 1953
• FOUND: woman's long-lost cousins are in Tulsa
• his grandmother's savior at Auschwitz
• class of 1930 students in a Poland high school
• a promising poet whose life was extinguished
• 1926 killing: appropriate vengeance or unjustified?
• can woman's "dead" sister be living in America?
• where did U.S.-bound Ukrainian uncle end up?
• FOUND: Brooklyn cousins of Denver man
• Australian woman seeks cousins in Russia
• a childhood friend with a life-long effect on a girl
• Spanish monastery where couple hid in WWII
• TWO FOUND: Ukraine-born uncle and childhood friend
• FOUND: Baltimore cousins -- in a car-repair shop!
• Yad Vashem's name-recovery project reunites cousins
• museum seeks baseball memories -- and memorabilia
• FOUND: Jacques Faitlovitch's relatives (see 16th link, above)
• born in trauma, a four-generation collage emits love
• FOUND: an unknown cousin; reunion of kids saved in India
• could woman's sister be the girl in photo of Holocaust survivors?
• a Tel Aviv reunion -- and a classmate's sudden death on its eve
• learning a classmate's burial spot brings solace
• reconnecting with a U.S. cousin; cemetery reunites living classmates
• far from N.Y. school, classmates hold a 40-year reunion
• woman retraces her late father's youth in Prague
• for 90th anniversary, an L.A. synagogue seeks artifacts
• paratroopers preserve bonds 40 years after Yom Kippur War
• 81 years later, friends' great-grandsons meet
• French man looks for father he never knew
• where are kin of Egyptian hero of WWII-era Berlin?
• elementary-school reunion leaves classmates on a high
• FOUND: a photograph reunites Chicago and Israeli cousins
• FOUND: fate of man who disappeared 20+ years ago
• in Salonika, a unique graduation of long-ago students
• U.S. veteran, 96, reunites people he and his unit liberated in 1945
• FOUND: chatter on Baltimore trolley leads to cousins' reunion
• an old cookbook's jottings prompt search for who wrote them
• FOUND: American cousins of Romanian-Israeli woman
• FOUND: woman who'd attended Salonika school (see 5 links up)
• FOUND: family of pediatric hospital's founder
• FOUND: kin of denied Olympic sprinters Glickman and Stoller
• FOUND: U.S. cousin of recently reunited Ukrainian and Israeli
• Manhattan synagogue president stirs descendants' genealogy interest
• FOUND: famed basketball coach's cousin
• FOUND: schoolmates reconnect after a half-century
• relatives mourn a woman cut off from her family
• woman wants to find her natural parents
• 70 years later, sketches bring together subject and artist's descendant
• who's the woman whose gravestone was found on a beach?
• honoring her mother's Belgian rescuers
• South African high school class holds 40-year reunion
• New Yorker memorializes a pianist-cousin
• an anarchists' colony drew man's grandparents to Home, Washington
• roots in Iran, cousins in two other countries reconnect
• hero of key '73 tank battle seeks soldiers he helped save
• Haifa woman seeks survivor-relatives from Tapozcany, Czechoslovakia
• Ben Zion Kalb's list of Polish Jews smuggled to safety in Czechoslovakia
• immigrants celebrate a third of a century as each other's surrogate family
• FOUND: Greece native hopes to find her friend from the post-WWII era
• a family's trauma that's extended several generations
• the mechanic's friend driving the 1962 Bonneville
• a day's outing leads to basalt boulders -- and to memorializing seven killed there in 1951
• FOUND: woman and girl in photo of train liberated on April 13, 1945
• a teacher and the colleague who was like a daughter to her
• the 100th "Seeking Kin" column (!) honors four new friends
• FOUND: descendants of brother of California woman's grandfather from Urmia, Iran
• woman in Scotland makes startling discoveries and seeks more
• Brazilian man learns of his grandfather's sister's surviving the Holocaust
• Ami Magazine: essay/feature on the value "Seeking Kin" brings
• FOUND: British relatives of ex-Dodgers' catcher Norm Sherry
• an eight-decade-ago disappearance has Atlanta family wondering about Wender
• FOUND: granddaughter of Hungarian cookbook author (see 34 links back: "an old cookbook's jottings ...")
• FOUND: mechanic's friend turns up in California (see story on search, 12 links back)
• an unheralded hero who helped save 40,000 people in Budapest
• Israeli man seeks relatives who left from Germany and South Africa for the U.S.
• FOUND: a Jerusalem man from a hospitable family three decades ago
• FOUND: three more people saved near Auschwitz gas chamber's door (see fourth link from the top)
• Arkansas woman discovers her roots -- and relatives
• man finds century-old photograph of a soldier, then locates soldier's cousin and gives her it
• sailors who participated in U.S. bicentennial celebration seek shipmates
• FOUND: nephew of deceased woman who'd been institutionalized and disowned
