Along with the daily tasks of saving lives, Magen David Adom (MDA) operates the Tracing Services for locating relatives and renewing family ties department. The department handles many applications, most of them from descendants of Holocaust survivors, and has managed to connect hundreds of relatives and locate many documents over the years.
Magen David Adom is by law the State of Israel's National Rescue Organization and a full member of the International Red Cross Movement since 2006. As is customary in most Red Cross societies around the world, Magen David Adom operates in Israel, as part of its humanitarian activities, a department for locating relatives and renewing family ties. The service is provided to people who have been separated from their families involuntarily, due to wars or natural disasters and is done in cooperation with national Red Cross societies around the world, the International Tracing Services (ITS), and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The unit handles many inquiries, most of them from descendants of Holocaust survivors and has managed to connect hundreds of relatives, locate many documents over the years, help locate graves and more.
During the past year, from Holocaust Remembrance Day 2022 until today, approximately 150 family tracing requests for Holocaust survivors were received and processed by MDA, and relatives for whom the search began several years ago, were located by the department. Throughout the years, 4,150 requests for help have been received by the department, relatives were found and documents testifying to the fate of the family members and in six of the cases pairs of brothers and sisters were united, some of whom did not know about each other at all.
The MDA department that operates in Israeli society has a special importance, where there are many Holocaust survivors. Their families and descendants who lost contact with their relatives during the war seek to locate information about the fate of their relatives, and the treatment of Holocaust survivors is of the utmost urgency due to the many years that have passed, their advanced age and the resulting reduced chance of family reunification.
Shulamit Rosenthaler, who manages the MDA Tracing Services Department, said: "Most of the inquiries that reach the unit are from families of Holocaust survivors seeking to locate information about their loved ones. Due to the sensitivity and overall importance of the issue of family reunification and receiving information about the family and following the Holocaust in particular, we treat and act in every possible way and against all possible factors in order to locate information for the applicants. In a majority of the cases we manage to locate documents and information about family histories during the Holocaust."
Director General of MDA, Eli Bin, said: "The Tracing Services and renewal of family ties department at MDA has succeeded in uniting and bringing together many family members over the years, and receiving information on many more cases that have come to our attention. It has greatly contributed to closing the circle and providing relief to families who believed that the information would not be found forever. I have no doubt that thanks to their hard work we will experience more emotional reunions."