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Kerry has Jewish ancestry

By Khalid Hasan

WASHINGTON: John Kerry obviously could not come himself, but his brother Cameron Kerry came to Israel last week to look around, meet people and see the security fence that has been declared illegal by the International Court of Justice and widely denounced elsewhere in the world.

It came to light last year that the Kerry family has Jewish roots in Europe. According to JTA, the Israeli news agency, Cameron Kerry, who is an adviser on his brother’s presidential campaign, called the visit “personal,” He travelled all over the country and was given an escorted tour of the fenced areas.

JTA said, “The Kerry campaign is seeking to maintain support in the November election from Jewish voters, who have long been a solid Democratic voting bloc. Cameron Kerry grew up Catholic, but converted to Judaism when he married Kathy Weinman, a Jewish woman he met while the two worked at a Washington law firm. She travelled with her husband to Israel. It was revealed last year that the Kerry family has Jewish roots in Europe. Their paternal grandparents were Jews from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire who changed the family name from Kohn to Kerry before immigrating to the United States in the early 20th century. There is just a feeling of ‘an extraordinary sense of irony,’ Cameron Kerry said of the revelation. ‘I called up Kathy’s parents and said ‘I’m Jewish,’ and they said, ‘Yeah we know’ and I said, ‘No, I’m really Jewish.’ ”

Kerry’s trip to Israel was sponsored by a branch of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He travelled with his wife and Jay Footlik, the Kerry campaign’s Jewish senior adviser on Middle East and Jewish affairs. While in Israel, he met Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the three most recent past prime ministers, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu. He was also shown the Nazi rosters that listed the deportations of his great aunt and uncle, Otto and Jenny Lowe, to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. One died there, the other died after being transported to Treblinka. Both were siblings of his paternal grandmother.

The typed lists of names, addresses, occupation and deportation dates were preserved in extra carbon copies made surreptitiously by Jewish inmates. He took copies of those lists to show his brother and other relatives.

Cameron Kerry told the news agency, “John (Kerry) has been here many times and one of the reasons I have wanted to come here is that he’s talked so vividly about his experiences here and about his own connections. I’ve grown up with a sense of Israel as a pioneering country and to see people still coming and sharing those aspirations is a strong link to Israel as I’ve come to understand it even before becoming a Jew myself.” He said he sees a historic link between the founding ideals of the United States and Israel. Both societies have tried “to carve out a unique society as pioneers and pilgrims. That is what my non-Jewish forebears did in New England.”

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