If you have ever wondered about your roots, today through the process of genetics, science has a partial answer for you. You can even buy that information online by completing a simple form and sending them a sample of your DNA, your specific twenty-three chromosomes that define who you are genetically according to modern science. Submission of your DNA sample might give you some idea of your physical ancestry, and answer some questions you may have about your physical ancestry; perhaps even give you a stronger sense of identity if that’s what you are seeking. But I propose your identity is more than just the physical you! Generally accepted wisdom is that your personality is shaped by your environment and experiences from the time you were born; some believe that the shaping begins when we are yet in the womb. I think most people will agree that human beings are much more than just a complex chemistry.

The Bible says we are “wonderfully made” by our creator, and unless you are an ardent atheist, I hope you would agree! Scientists for centuries, millennia, have studied and labored to “discover” how man came about. When I was a young man, I worked in a lab where the lead scientist had the goal of duplicating a living creature in a test tube. Needless to say, the project was not successful, but that didn’t deter future scientists and their sponsors from seeking that goal till this present day. There have been many benefits to this scientific research in regards to medical discoveries, but re-creation of human beings is not one of them. Personally I don’t believe God will allow man to achieve that goal, to duplicate His work. If you dismiss the Bible or what it says about creation and have your own ideas about your own existence, perhaps you should read no more of this article. But if even if only curious, by all means, read on! For what I wish to share is from my personal testimony, and each of us has our own, but perhaps there are some similarities with which you can relate.

I was born in the middle of WWII and became curious about my ancestry at a young age because it seemed other children in our neighborhood weren’t very friendly towards me. We lived next door to my Mom’s parents and across the street from Mom’s spinster aunt and her dad. A couple blocks away, all three of Mom’s brothers had homes with their families, after they had each returned from serving during WWII. In essence I lived in a predominantly ethnic neighborhood. A couple years after the war, I began elementary school just up the hill from our house in Pittsburgh. For some reason, it seemed difficult to make friends. I realize that was partly because Mom was overprotective. But also it seemed the other kids in the neighborhood had some kind of a bias towards my family. Our neighborhood, like many in Pittsburgh, was an ethnic integration primarily of European immigrants and their descendants, many of which were German. Granddad was a first generation American, his father having immigrated to Pittsburgh as a young blacksmith with his wife. Great granddad had worked in a shop alongside a railroad spur emanating from downtown. He fashioned iron tires to Conestoga wagon wheels brought in from another shop. The affixing of iron tires to wooden wheels was important to settlers desirous of travelling westward in hopes of establishing a superior lifestyle for themselves and their future families. The iron tread enabled the wagons to endure the rugged, often rocky terrain during this long westward journey. Great granddad died when 45, likely from the failure of his lungs to exposure due of the work environment.

Grandma was herself an immigrant from Germany for she came with her mother when she was only two years old. Her mother had lost her husband in Berlin and came to America to remarry a man in Youngstown, Ohio, another mill town like Pittsburgh. So one would have thought we should have felt comfortable in that neighborhood, that was predominantly German, but reality was otherwise and my curiosity was piqued. When I asked Mom about Granddad’s ethnicity, she merely told me they were both good German Lutherans; end of discussion. Mom explained that the ending of her surname was German and not Jewish because it ended in “stein” and not “stein”, which she said was the Jewish derivative. I somehow sensed over the ensuing years that there was something more to the story, something not ever to be discussed within the family. When on occasion I asked several of my uncles, they told the same story Mom had, but I continued to be curious.

When I was in third grade, Mom’s parents moved to the suburbs from the home next door, and in which they had raised Mom and her siblings. Mom convinced Dad that we should move next door, and so we moved into their former home, Mom’s childhood home and in which she felt very much at home. A year later, we moved from urban Pittsburgh to the suburbs at Mom’s insistence, for she wanted to be nearer her parents. Dad had found a newly constructed house about one mile away from them. Mom never learned to drive and soon became unhappy that we lived so far from her parents, which caused her daily visits to cease. Dad liked having a new house with less to repair, more land and more separation from neighbors. His work schedule of working different shifts every week at the steel mill affected his ability to get to know our neighbors, but he made their acquaintance. He offered repeatedly to teach Mom to drive, so she could get about, but she elected not to learn and became more and more reclusive. I became acquainted with the other kids along our country road, and discovered from their surnames that we now lived in a mixed European neighborhood. It was about one half mile to the intersection of our road and the main road, where I awaited the big yellow school bus every morning and was dropped off every afternoon. My brother and I remained apart from the other kids, partly because we were the “new kids” in the neighborhood. But also because Mom never became friendly towards other kids when we invited them home. Mom had a strong religious prejudice especially towards Roman Catholics and many in our new neighborhood were Roman Catholic. She didn’t have much love for Jews either, because they had crucified the Messiah. She was always suspicious of anyone with whom we sought to make friends, and consequently my brother Bob and became isolated. It felt like we had to be guarded against every neighbor, and his or her children for some unexplained reason. Mom harbored so much paranoia; fear that she had a “nervous breakdown” when I was twelve years old. She never fully recovered and lived the remainder of her natural life, medicated, occasionally hospitalized, and pretty isolated from would be friends, and family. Her breakdown was a crushing blow to her parents as well as my Dad and us children.

One of my vivid memories was viewing armed forces films taken during the liberation of the Nazi death camps after the Allied victory in Europe. I was so stirred by this exposed evidence of the atrocities done by the German people, that the conflict within me about my ancestry was further aroused. I felt deep shame for being at least half German. I could not understand why the “good German people” that Mom had insisted we descended from could have done such evil against their own neighbors. I didn’t want anyone to know Mom’s maiden name, for fear they would think unkindly towards me. I began to believe Mom’s ideas that it must have been the Roman Catholics in Germany that perpetrated this evil against the Jews, but she was in a lot of denial that it ever actually occurred, regardless of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I was pretty successful at hiding Mom’s maiden name from most people until I became an adult. When I did have to reveal it, I always explained that the spelling was the German “stein” and not the Jewish “stein” as Mom had taught me. Since my Dad’s surname was English, the question wasn’t raised many times while I was an adolescent. I managed to bury my internal conflict regarding my identity for decades, but it was always there like a demon sitting on my shoulder that periodically harassed me in the form of fear, guilt and shame, and that affected my feeling of self-worth. And I had many doubts that eternal life was certain, despite my asking Christ into my life.

When I had matured as a Christian and was in my fifties, I became interested in visiting the Holy Land. I joined a tour, which was led jointly by my former pastor and a Jewish rabbi. When I had breakfast one morning a few days into that tour, I asked the rabbi about Mom’s surname. He said it was definitely a Jewish surname, and further shared that stein and stein were interchangeable endings to many Jewish surnames; in fact his surname was spelled stein. Thus he refuted what Mom had told me. I resolved to discover more facts about Mom’s family.

The opportunity to do so presented itself when we were at last in Jerusalem and a tour of the Holocaust Memorial had been arranged. During that outing I wandered away from the group and visited the archives housed in that Memorial building. I asked the clerk if Mom’s maiden surname was possibly Jewish, and he immediately replied “positively”, which validated what I had a couple days earlier been told by the rabbi. He asked if I wanted to view the records and I hesitatingly said yes. He then ushered me into a tiny cubicle with a desk on which was placed a microfilm viewer and an office chair. He returned a few minutes later with a can of film, loaded the film in the viewer and forwarded it to Mom’s family surname. The images on the film were of the index cards captured by the Allies from the Nazi concentration camps, which had been collected by the Jews, photographed and archived in alphabetical order by surnames of the prisoners. I scrolled through these records one by one noting the countries and cities from which these persons had been rounded up and their ages. All ages of people were included, and I concluded I was viewing complete multigenerational families from differing geographical areas, all rounded up at one time. I scrolled downward till I had counted over one hundred names, men, women and children. The records showed that each died in those camps. I felt in those moments a kinship to each of those lost souls who were cruelly treated. These relatives had lived in Berlin, Prague and Warsaw. I felt sadness for all of them, really for all the Jewish people who had thus incarcerated and treated so inhumanely by others. When I completed my viewing, the very courteous clerk informed me that since my mother was of Jewish origin, I could become an immediate Israeli citizen. I at once had a sense of ancestral belonging, but graciously declined his offer.

I didn’t realize till much later than Mom must have never understood the experiences her parents and siblings might have had during WWII because of their obviously Jewish surname. They must have wondered why the letters from their many European relatives stopped coming while news was spreading about the Nazi incarceration of Jews in the death camps. I can only imagine the fear that evolved when their own neighbors began to distance themselves. Just imagine the conflict that might have arisen within them when they had been told by parents, grandparents, to be proud of their German Lutheran heritage, only to have that belief challenged by a new reality. I do not believe that Mom, her siblings, or her parents, my maternal grandparents, ever understood why the Nazis singled out Jews based upon their surname alone, because they identified themselves with German nationals due to their Christian beliefs. They must have become very confused. Many, like my grandparent’s relatives had become so Christianized and so melded into German and other European cultures for generations’ prior, that they had lost any identity with their ethnic roots. Years after my discovery in Jerusalem, I was visited by my godfather, Uncle Alvin, Mom’s youngest brother. I asked him what he knew about his surname. He said he often wondered himself whether what his parents had told him was the truth. He had his own personal experiences that made him curious. For he had been granted an unusual benefit by a Jewish sergeant when he had volunteered for the war in 1944, just after completing high school. A Jewish enlistment sergeant noted his name and favored him by assigning him to the US Army Air Corps, a much coveted but unexpected action. And Uncle Alvin had made several trips to Germany, and despite many attempts to reunite with long lost relatives; he reported there wasn’t a single relative listed in the phone books. I offered what I had discovered when on my pilgrimage a number of years prior. He was incredulous!

Some of my friends have also discovered they had Jewish roots, and it seems to me that they have taken significant pride in becoming recognized and “special” because of their Jewish heritage. I acquired a new sense of belonging to the global family of God in Christ. And much of my internal conflict was resolved; my questions had been answered. I became more enthusiastic about further self-awareness, and less fearful of what I might discover if I pursued that path more aggressively.

But the most significant blessing has been a personal assurance of my identity, my value before God. These words are recorded in Paul’s letter to the Romans, …”Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?….No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:35-39). I now realize that no matter how we may feel, no matter our doubts, no matter what our life experiences, no matter how we perceive our worth, we can never become lost to God, and on that we can stake our eternal well being.

I believe the goal of self-understanding is written by St. Paul, …”Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” (I Corinthians 13:12). God knows each of us intimately; he knows all our thoughts. He waits to be discovered by us!

What I have found in my quest is that despite my insecurities, lack of positive nurturing, and lamenting my childhood experiences, God had planned my existence and had used my “discovery” to convince me more fully of His great love for me regardless of who I am or how I feel about myself. I am just another sinner saved by God’s grace! God’s love is everlasting!

The broader truth is that God created each one of us out of His love, and wants to have fellowship with each of us. He has built into each of us, you and me, a longing for a personal relationship with Him. That relationship can only be gained through the narrow gate, Jesus Christ, but once obtained can never be severed. Contemplate that and may you find your own personal identity in Him! God Bless your seeking!