The DNA Detectives.

By The Herald (Australia)

The powerful forensic techniques developed to identify victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks and the tsunami are about to be used for another worthwhile purpose: reuniting Jewish families separated by the Holocaust.

The DNA Shoah project, announced last week in Nature magazine, will be one of the most ambitious. pieces of DNA detective work ever. It will attempt to build a database of the DNA of the 300,000 known Holocaust survivors, scattered across the world. DNA "fingerprinting" has often been used to trace the history of peoples, but never on such a scale.

The founder of the DNA Shoah Project is Syd Mandelbaum, a historian and forensic scientist whose parents survived the Holocaust, or Shoah, as it is known in Hebrew.

It was Mandelbaum who, in 1994, headed the American team which used DNA sequencing to disprove the relationship of Anna Anderson Manahan to the Czar and Czarina Romanov, in her claim to be Anastasia. This landmark case became the first to use DNA to solve historical mysteries.

Alongside him will be another pioneering DNA historian, Michael Hammer, a geneticist from the University of Arizona. It was Hammer who co-authored the paper which used Y-chromosome analysis to show that present-day Cohanim - Jewish high priests - are descended from a single male ancestor.

The duo, aided by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, aim to start collecting cheek swabs from survivors. As the database grows, they will begin to look for matches with DNA samples taken from the remains of unidentified Holocaust victims that have recently started to surface in Poland, Germany and elsewhere in Europe.

The DNA Shoah Project will also use the data to reunite some of the roughly 10,000 Holocaust orphans who were sent abroad after the war to countries including Britain, the United States and Israel.

Mandelbaum explains: "The project will unite loved ones and further establish closure for families who have missing relatives. Most of the six million Jews who were murdered were not cremated but buried after their death in unmarked mass graves. Remains of Holocaust victims continue to surface throughout Europe because of continual land development, but, until this project, there was no way positively to identify the victims."