“We reminisce about stories from home,” he said when asked what brothers who have been separated for 61 years speak about. “There has been nothing hard about this meeting,” he said. “It has all been easy.”
According to Yad Vashem spokeswoman Lisa Davidson, reunions of this sort are very rare. This is only the fourth time in the past 15 years that siblings have been reunited through the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority — the last were reunited about seven years ago.
In contrast, there have been about 100 instances of cousins and other distant relatives finding each other.
The brothers last saw one another in their hometown of Tomaszow in 1941, as the German Army advanced on Soviet-occupied Poland. Leonid was drafted into the Red Army, and Lazar was recruited into the youth groups deployed on work details throughout the Soviet Union.
Lazar immigrated to Israel from Poland in 1957, and Leonid in 1995 from Ukraine. For the past five years they were unaware they were living only 50 miles from each other — Lazar in Herzliya and Leonid in Kiryat Gat.
Earlier this year, Lazar’s daughter suggested filling out a form at Yad Vashem’s Hall of Names — it was the missing link that connected the long-lost brothers. Each thought he was the sole survivor of a family of two parents, five boys and one girl.
“I was sure there was no one,” Lazar said.