“Bussel, David and his daughter Esther Lotker from Novogrudok, currently in New York are sought by Nachum Kushner.”
The ad, in Yiddish, appeared on page two of the May 17, 1946, edition of the Forward, the nation’s largest Jewish newspaper. It was one of dozens under the title “Jewish Survivors Seeking Their American Relatives.”
Nachum Kushner was the great-grandfather of Jared Kushner, former president Donald Trump’s son-in-law and White House adviser. A hatmaker from what is now Belarus, Nachum survived the Holocaust with his daughters Rae (Jared’s grandmother) and Lisa by tunneling out of the Novogrudok ghetto and living among resistance fighters in the forest. In the same woods, Jared’s grandfather, Joseph Berkowitz, who had escaped from a work camp, hid with his siblings.
Seven decades later, their grandson became a top official in an administration that sharply restricted immigration and cut the number of refugees the country admits to its lowest level ever. Trump, in his current presidential campaign, has pledged to suspend the refugee program, ban refugees from Gaza, and turn back asylum seekers.
New details about Kushner’s family history reveal the extent of the aid and shelter his grandparents received upon their arrival in the United States as desperate, nearly penniless refugees.
After the war, Joseph and Rae found each other in Budapest and married in August 1945. They and the other surviving family members were then smuggled from Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe into American-occupied Italy. Unable to continue to Palestine, as originally planned, they entered a displaced persons camp.
It was there that the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration placed the ad for the Kushners. Survivors were desperate to find their families, and NGOs were hoping to find visa sponsors for the stateless refugees in their care. Each week, the Forward ran hundreds of free ads and broadcast the listings over the radio.
The Kushners were looking for David Bussel, an 80-year-old retired garment worker in the Bronx who had left Europe in the 1880s. He was the uncle of Joseph Berkowitz, who later took his wife’s last name, Kushner. The following Monday, the Kushners ran another ad for Nachum’s relative Leah Gross, who had immigrated to New York in 1901.
They found them both.
“We wanted to leave for Israel, but at the time it wasn’t possible,” said Rae Kushner in a Yiddish-language testimony recorded in 1972 at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and museum. “We wanted to go to Africa, but it was difficult to enter. Until we were able to connect with America.”