Dr. Walter Semkiw is a physician at Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco. Before that, he was medical director for Union 76. He got his medical degree at the University of Illinois-Chicago. His parents were immigrants from Ukraine during World War II.
And he is the reincarnation of John Adams, the second president of the United States.
At least that’s the way he identifies himself on his Web site, in lectures, in his book and when he was a guest on “Coast to Coast AM,” a late-night, call-in radio show that deals largely with conspiracies, UFOs and the paranormal.
Semkiw is among the organizers of the second annual Wisdom Festival, being held at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center on Saturday, Oct. 18 and Sunday, Oct. 19. The event is billed as the convergence of “Science and Spirit.”
Semkiw is the author of “Return of the Revolutionaries: The Case for Reincarnation and Soul Groups United,” a book in which he presents multiple, independently researched reincarnation cases, using facial features, personality traits, aptitudes and writing styles to make the cases.
On the second day of the conference, he will give a 90-minute talk starting at 2 p.m. on “Scientific Basis for Reincarnation,” during which he will spend a good deal of time on one of the most interesting and important cases from his book — the reincarnation of a Christian, Swedish author-poet as Anne Frank.
Barbro Karlen, 54, has resided in Salinas since 2000, but when she was a child growing up in Sweden during the 1950s, she was largely unaware of the horrors of the Holocaust.
Her family wasn’t Jewish, and the Scandinavian country was mostly inured to what had happened to the Six Million. Yet Karlen had a mysterious, visceral connection to the Shoah.
Throughout her childhood, Karlen harbored a fear of enclosed rooms, people in uniform and showers. Her parents were at a loss to explain their daughter’s emotional trauma, and their concern was exacerbated when she repeatedly told them, “My name is Anne Frank, and soon my dad will pick me up, because I don’t belong here.”
Almost a decade before Frank’s diary was published in Sweden and before the doomed teenager’s story became one of the Holocaust’s most searing stories, Karlen began to have memories associated with Anne Frank’s life.
Karlen eventually reconciled the trauma of her past by accepting what she believes to be an irrefutable fact: She is the reincarnation of Anne Frank.
“When I was growing up, my parents took me to psychologists and everything else,” Karlen said in a phone interview this week. “I was told never to talk about these things when we had company.”
According to Karlen, her parents’ fears turned to amazement when the family went on a 1964 tour of European cities. In Amsterdam, they planned to take a cab to the Anne Frank House, but Barbro told her parents she knew the way instinctively, and led them through a series of winding, narrow streets to the house. Karlen said her parents were even more flabbergasted when she told them about the pictures of movie stars she (Anne Frank) had pinned up on the walls.
When Karlen’s mother gently told her daughter that there were no pictures on the wall, Karlen started to cry. That prompted Karlen’s mother to ask the guide if there were any pictures on the wall at some point. The guide said that there were, in fact, newspaper pictures of movie stars on the wall, but they were being re-framed due to excessive wear and tear.
From that point on, Karlen said, her mother never doubted that her daughter was the reincarnation of Anne Frank. Her father, while admitting that the evidence was overwhelming, avoided discussing the issue.
Karlen, similar to Anne Frank, had a propensity for writing. At the age of 12, she wrote a book of poems called “Man on Earth.” Later in life, she wrote a book called “And the Wolves Howled” about her experiences growing up with memories of being Anne Frank. (Karlen is not on the schedule to speak at the Wisdom Festival.)
Around the age of 15, Karlen stopped having memories of being Anne Frank. She said this was partially a matter of self-preservation and partially due to the fact that she tried to confront some of her fears head-on.
According to the “Encyclopedia Judaica,” reincarnation has never been a doctrine of Judaism, nor has it cropped up in modern Jewish thought, although some certain sects do examine it from time to time. The Zohar (a book of mysticism that serves as guide for Kabbalah) is said to refer to reincarnation several times.
For his part, Semkiw espouses reincarnation as the antidote to wars based on religion and nationality. “Mainstream religion exists because of fear of death,” Semkiw said during a recent interview.
According to Semkiw, if “Palestinians knew that they could come back reincarnated as Jews, and vice versa it would certainly lead to greater peace throughout the entire Middle East.”
The Wisdom Festival is a two-day event at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco on Saturday, Oct. 18 and Sunday, Oct. 19. Information: www.wisdomfestival.com.