Forty years ago, Joel Alpert started a mission to uncover the history of his ancestors, the Krelitz family who lived in Lithuania and who were nearly all killed during World War II. Last Thursday, in the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, he presented his discoveries about his family's history and how it came to be featured in the Family Fates room of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial. Alpert's relentless search to find his family members is directly related to the Krelitz family's prominent role in the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin.

Alpert's story dates back to 1965, when he learned from his grandfather about the Krelitz family. Prior to this, Alpert said he had no idea he had a personal connection to the Holocaust. He was immediately filled with a desire to find the surviving members of the family and said in his presentation that the fact that no one had mentioned these lost family members "compounded the tragedy" for him.

In his presentation, "The Krelitz Family: A Personal Face in Berlin's New Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe," he explained that in 1993 he translated The Memorial Book for the Jewish Community of Yurburg, where the Krelitz family lived, and uploaded his translation to a Web site that provides information about Jewish life before the Holocaust.

Dr. Ulrich Baumann, the man with the vision for the Berlin memorial, learned about the Krelitz family through this Web site. The site also features 1927 film footage of the family that Alpert's cousin Ben Crane found and that inspired Baumann to put the Krelitz family on display in the "Room of Families" in the memorial, which opened in 2005.

Alpert described the film, which is currently stored in the National Center for Jewish Film at Brandeis, as a "powerful lens into pre-war Yerburg."

This film was only one part of what Alpert described as "persistence and luck," in his successful quest to find his missing family members. In 1994 he uploaded a picture of his immediate family onto the Web site with the other information about the Krelitz family.

Max Krelitz-Sherman, his second cousin in Mexico, came upon the Web site in his own search for more information about his family and discovered that he had the same photo.

The two men met and confirmed that their mothers were first cousins. Krelitz's mother Esther's story was critical to Alpert's search for his family. Upon Esther's death, her son discovered thousands of letters with information about the family's story. Alpert found a survivor from Yerburg, Jack Cossid, who knew the Krelitz family and translated the letters.

Alpert now had full access to his family's history. One of these letters, written by Esther's father Moshe Krelitz before the war asking his family in Mexico about the possibility of immigration, is now on display in the Berlin memorial.

Alpert's presentation was as much about his search for his family as it was praise for the memorial itself. In May 2005, Alpert attended the unveiling of the memorial with 15 of his cousins and then journeyed to Yerburg.

He said that as he built a relationship with Dr. Baumann he learned that the memorial is the Germans' way of acknowledging their wrongdoings and he came to realize the memorial's necessity. He feels the purpose of the memorial is to teach future Germans about the Holocaust: "It is aimed at the German people, not the tourists."

The event was well-received by the students who attended. "Alpert handled a very personal subject with a lot of tact," said Erica Lubitz '12. She said she thought that "the actual footage really resonated with me. Everything is just stories until you actually see the people involved."

Like Lubitz, Molly Haas-Hooven '09 also enjoyed the personal aspect of the presentation. "I thought it was really interesting to get someone's personal narrative to something that is so publicized," she said.