Brookline, MA – Curious Rabbi in Russia Starts Chain of Events That Leads Woman To Finding Relatives

Brookline, MA – Grunie Uminer said she realizes more than ever that God is the prime mover in this world, putting people into circumstances and places that can bring about unimagined results and change one’s reality.

“You never know who you are taking and interacting with,” said the Brookline resident. “You might be talking to your cousin, relative or even royalty.”

Uminer knows this firsthand after recently meeting relatives she never knew she had, more than seven decades after her Russian ancestors were scattered across the former Soviet Union. Her long-lost cousins came from all over the world and greeted each other for the first time in February at the International Conference of Chabad-Lubavitch Women Emissaries in Brooklyn, N.Y.

The reunion came about after a seemingly unrelated event occurred about a month before in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. Boris Plaksin was observing the anniversary of his father’s death at the local Chabad house. The rabbi asked Plaksin his Hebrew name so he could be called up to the Torah. When Plaksin said it was Dovber Mendel, the rabbi became intrigued.

“It was a distinctly Hassidic name and the two talked about it,” Uminer said. Plaksin revealed his mother’s maiden name was Duchman, whereupon the rabbi said he recognized it as that of a nurse at a summer camp where his mother worked years before in the United States. He told Plaksin the nurse came from a family with Chabad emissaries around the world.

Plaksin told the rabbi his great-uncles were Chabad Hassidim in Russia, but he thought they died in the Holocaust. Even so, he called his great-niece, Ella Vorovitch. Vorovitch lives in Canada, where she is the rebbetzin (wife of the rabbi) at a Toronto Chabad and the editor of the Russian edition of Exodus Magazine, a publication of the Jewish Russian Community Center of Toronto.

Vorovitch began researching her ancestors and learned that her great-grandmother’s brothers had survived World War II and immigrated to the United States, where they fathered families who run Chabad houses all over, including Turkey, Morocco, China, Florida, Tennessee, Connecticut and New York.

Vorovitch’s great-grandmother was the sister of Uminer’s great-grandfather.

Since learning of the connection, Uminer has been able to piece together bits of information about her ancestors.

“No one talked about the Holocaust when Ella was growing up,” she said. “She would have done this research a lot earlier if she had any information.”

Most amazing to Uminer is that some of the people she recently learned she’s related to are those she was already in contact with through her work with Chabad Center in Chestnut Hill.

“When I realized that one woman and her family — who have been good friends of ours for a few years — attend services at our synagogue and are part of our community, and a second woman — who was our graphic designer for our community calendar for five years — are related to me, I honestly couldn’t believe it,” she said. “It teaches us to really respect each person and afford them dignity; they might end up being connected to us in ways we could never have imagined.”

And one of the distant cousins she recently realized is part of her family was Natalie Naiman, whom Uminer already knew.

“Last year, a couple of days before Passover, Natalie’s father, who had emigrated from Russia and was living in Utah, suddenly passed away,” Uminer said. “Natalie and her husband decided to bury him in Boston and called my husband [Rabbi Mendy Uminer] and asked him to officiate at the funeral. Little did we know that we were extending ourselves to a man we had never met, but who was from our family. We only found out almost a year later that he was my grandmother’s cousin.”