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Podcast: North Star with Ellin Bessner
Episode: He thought his family was wiped out in the Holocaust. Then he discovered 75,000 distant relatives—including Bob Dylan and Bette Midler
Description: When 500 members of the Kuklya family got together in England a few years ago for their first-ever reunion, the story got a lot of international attention. They were all descendants of the same man, Aba Kukla, who lived in a tiny village in Lithuania in the late 1700s. He had nine sons and a few daughters, and each went on to produce huge families of their own, creating a sprawling family tree that, only now, with the advent of DNA testing, can be fully grasped.
Despite hundreds of their relatives being wiped out in the Holocaust, the...