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Anna Geisherik was looking for a needle in a haystack. The native of Ukraine, now living in New York, knew she had one relative who’d made it to the United States. But he’d left Ukraine in 1918. Could she find his family? She wasn’t sure — all she had was a last name, Goldberg, mentioned once by her mother during an emotional conversation.

“I even tried Googling, you know? Like, ‘Goldberg, California,’” she said. “Well, guess how many Goldbergs are in California!”

In a twist of fate, finding the answer turned out to be pretty easy — but not by using Google. Unbeknown to Geisherik, Goldberg’s children and grandchildren in the Bay Area were looking, too. Through commercial genetic testing, they managed to find each other, closing the gaps of history to become one family again long after two world wars tore them apart.

“I think what’s unique in the story is that we were both looking for each other,” Geisherik said.

The pivotal person in the family web was Rabbi Mayer Goldberg, a respected pillar of the East Bay and San Francisco Jewish communities. He died in 1992 at the age of 100, or possibly a little older, as his birthdate was never substantiated.

But when the man who became Mayer Goldberg left the town of Kremenchuk in Ukraine, he was called Mayer Vovrik. As a young man, he had left his home to work and study at the yeshiva in Kiev, and then at 21 he was due to be conscripted into the Russian army.

“He left the Ukraine — it’s quite a story,” said his daughter Rachel Landes, 97, who lives in the Rossmoor senior community in Walnut Creek. “He went down to Palestine and studied with the famous Rabbi Abraham Kook for a while.”

At the start of World War I, Mayer had to flee again (from the Turks, who were rounding up Russian nationals in pre-state Israel, Landes said), so “he just got on a ship and went to Alexandria.”

After arriving in Egypt, he obtained a passport under the name Goldberg, probably on the black market, Landes said. From there he made it to the U.S., where he worked and studied and became a rabbi. (In a short biography Landes wrote about her father in 2009, she said he was told to come to the West Coast by a senior rabbi to “organize Hebrew studies in that ‘wilderness.’”)

“They came down to this area and settled,” Landes said. “He bought a bed and breakfast.”

He lost that business, but after moving to Oakland, he had greater luck with buying real estate. He eventually became a major player in Bay Area Jewish life as a scholar and philanthropist. He helped found the Hebrew Academy in San Francisco and was on the board of directors of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach’s counterculture shul, the House of Love and Prayer. He attended two synagogues in Oakland, the Orthodox Beth Jacob Congregation and Conservative Temple Beth Abraham.

“He supported every congregation, every form of Jewish education,” Landes said.

It was, in the end, an American success story. But as Goldberg forged a new life, his sisters and parents were on a different path.

“If you look at the side of the family that was in the Old World, it’s just tragedy after tragedy,” said Ginette King of Novato, Mayer Goldberg’s granddaughter. “And then those that survived went through communism and were robbed of their religion. It’s just this much bleaker version.”

Goldberg never talked much to his children about the life or family he’d left behind, although he did make regular attempts to get word of them. But life had continued in Ukraine without him, all throughout the terrible years of World War II.

“He left all his family behind, and he had many brothers and sisters, and parents who were, when the war started, already 80 years old,” Geisherik said. Except for two sisters, “all of them died in the Holocaust. So that was the other side of this story.”

Geisherik was born in Ukraine in 1971 and came to the U.S. when she was 22. Now a lecturer at Stony Brook University in New York, she grew up knowing little about her family in the Old Country, except that they were Jewish.

“It was the Soviet Union, and everybody hid things from everybody,” Geisherik said. “And you didn’t talk about things, and your families.”

But one day she discovered a photograph of her grandfather with a strange woman, and a story began to emerge.

“My mom told me that my grandmother — her mother — was not my real grandmother,” she said. “This is where it starts.”

Geisherik’s mother unfolded the tragic and tangled tale, shrouded in family secrecy, of the untimely death of her biological mother. Among the revelations was the mention of a relative who had emigrated, changing his name to Goldberg and ending up in California.

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Geisherik’s mother died soon after, however, and after that everything about the story seemed to be lost. “It was just a completely black wall,” she said. “There was nobody to ask.”

But Geisherik never forgot about the mysterious relative in California. So when 23andMe, the commercial genetic testing company, became available, Geisherik decided to do it.

“I was joking to my husband, I was like, ‘See, I’m going to do this test now. And then I’ll find this family in California who was waiting for me,’ you know? ‘Yeah, right,’” she said with a laugh. “That was kind of the joke.”

But it wasn’t a joke. King also did a 23andMe test. In 2017, she and Geisherik came up matched as second cousins.

After a lot of back and forth, piecing together the tattered shreds of the family story, the cousins eventually met in person in New York. King said she instantly felt a bond.

“We had a real connection right from the start,” King said. “We have so many similarities that nobody else in the family had. She and I just had so many things in common.”

When King announced to her family that she had gotten in touch with one of the last remaining members of Mayer Goldberg’s Ukrainian family, they were astounded.

“We were just blown away by the whole thing,” said Landes, Goldberg’s daughter in Walnut Creek.

Now they all meet regularly, with Geisherik attending as many gatherings as she can with Landes, King and a dozen or so cousins, all descendants of Mayer Goldberg.

“It was profound for all of us,” King said. “When she finally got to come out and meet everyone, it was really incredible.”

An added level of poignancy revolved around Mayer Goldberg’s lost name. No one in his American family had known exactly what it was, with only a vague idea.

But Geisherik? She knew.

“It took them 100 years [from Goldberg’s immigration] to find me so I could tell them the real last name,” she said. “And I found it out because my mom told me in that 20-minute conversation, 20 years ago, because I found that picture. If I didn’t find that picture, I would never know anything.”

That simple coincidence was all it took to reunite the families. If it had been overlooked, Geisherik and King never would have met. And that, for King, would have been a tragedy of its own kind.

“I think she was the person that I was missing in my life,” she said.