Kerry Lost 2 Relatives to Nazis

Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry, who discovered only last year the extent of his Jewish roots, lost two relatives in the Nazi genocide of World War II, officials at Israel’s Holocaust archive said Thursday.

A brother of Kerry’s grandmother died in the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia, and a sister of the grandmother vanished in the Treblinka death camp in Poland, archivists at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and museum told Associated Press.

Word of Kerry’s Jewish ancestry surfaced last year when an Austrian genealogist hired by the Boston Globe found that the Massachusetts senator’s paternal grandfather, Frederick A. Kerry, was born Fritz Kohn in 1873 in a village in what is now the Czech Republic.

In the early 1900s, Kohn changed his name and immigrated to the United States, presumably under circumstances similar to many of the region’s Jews, who migrated to seek better lives and escape anti-Semitism.

The news astonished Sen. Kerry, a Catholic. He already knew that his paternal grandmother, Ida Loewe, was born Jewish and converted to Catholicism.

On Sunday, Austrian genealogist Felix Gundacker posted on his institute’s website that a sister and brother of Ida Loewe were among the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust. Gundacker named the two as Jenny and Otto Loewe.

Kerry campaign officials confirmed that the two were a brother and sister of his grandmother.

On Thursday, researchers at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem said they had found the two names among nearly 3 million entries in its database of Holocaust victims.