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Her body has been unidentified for decades. Her Ashkenazi DNA may explain why
Murder investigators in Arizona are encountering a stubborn obstacle to solving a decades-old cold case involving an unidentified dead body: The woman’s Ashkenazi Jewish DNA.
In 1989, an unclothed dead body was found on the side of a highway in northwest Arizona. The woman was never identified, though small details offered clues about her life: red nail polish on her fingers and toes, faux diamond stud earrings, and a handmade floral blouse found under a nearby tree.
The woman appeared to have been beaten, found with a broken nose and possible hematoma on the left side of her skull, though the medical examiner did not determine a cause of death. An autopsy determined the woman was between 25 and 30 years old.
In 2021, authorities reopened the case and uploaded the woman’s DNA profile to genetic databases available to law enforcement, hoping for a breakthrough. Instead, they hit a wall.
“Investigators learned that the victim was 96% Ashkenazi Jew, which made it extremely difficult to trace her ancestry and locate family members,” the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.
Ashkenazi Jews who try to track down relatives through genetic testing are familiar with the problem that the sheriff encountered: DNA testing, usually a powerful tool for finding relatives, often does not yield usable results for them.
Adina Newman, a professional genealogist and co-founder of the Holocaust Reunion Project, which uses DNA testing to help connect Holocaust survivors and their relatives to lost family, says two factors explain why genetic testing has limited use for many Jews. One is what’s known as the founder effect, when a population can be traced back to a small number of ancestors — as few as 350 people in Ashkenazi Jews’ case. The other is endogamy, the practice of marrying within a community over many generations.
As a result, a person with 100% Ashkenazi DNA can have more than 200,000 DNA matches in popular genetic databases, according to Newman. From such a large pool, it can be difficult to pinpoint close relatives.
“Ashkenazi Jews are all DNA cousins. But am I going to find it meaningful in a [family] tree?” Newman said. “Mostly no. We’ve just kind of accepted that it convolutes things.”
Investigators, however, aren’t giving up. The Mohave County Sheriff’s Office enlisted the help of the Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center at Ramapo College in New Jersey, which last week released an artistic rendering of what the woman may have looked like based on her remains.
“This doesn’t mean that cases of Ashkenazi Jews are impossible to solve,” David Gurney, director of the Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center, told the Forward. “It just is going to take a lot more effort.”
Jewish Jane Does
The 1989 case in Arizona is not the only time Ashkenazi DNA has posed a challenge in identifying remains. Another active case, an Ashkenazi Jewish woman whose dead body was found in 1981 in Olympia, Washington, remains unsolved.
Other cases have taken years to crack. In 2024, investigators working with the DNA Doe Project finally identified the body of a Jewish woman found murdered in a California vineyard in 2011 as Ada Beth Kaplan. It also took more than a decade to identify Mitchell Mendelson, a Jewish man whose body was found in a wooded area near his home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 2012.
In both cases, the deceased’s Ashkenazi DNA made the process more laborious for investigators, though DNA also eventually led investigators to be able to make the identifications.
To be sure, Ashkenazi Jews are not the only population that exhibits endogamy, which is also common among Pennsylvania Dutch communities, Icelanders, French Canadians and other tight-knit societies.
But the combination of Ashkenazi Jews’ genetic overlap and a complex historical record can make Jewish identification especially difficult cases to crack, Newman said.
For instance, in Newman’s own family, records changed from listing Vilna as being located in Russia, then Poland, then Belarus over a short period of time. But her family members hadn’t moved; the borders were changing around them. Last names in her family were also altered to sound more anglicized.
“You have to know these things. And it’s hard because a lot of genetic genealogists, even the best ones, are not familiar with that,” Newman said, “They need people who understand the Jewish genealogy aspect.”
Even when genealogists have such expertise, limited data can slow progress. Lingering trauma from the Holocaust has made some Jews hesitant to upload their DNA to public databases, Newman said.
Others have privacy concerns: In 2024, 23andMe settled a class-action lawsuit for $30 million in which customers accused the company of failing to notify customers with Ashkenazi Jewish heritage that they appeared to have been specifically targeted by hackers, who sold their information on the dark web.
Yet unless they have a search warrant, law enforcement agencies are constrained to cross-referencing DNA profiles with just two databases: GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA, which collectively host about 3 million profiles. By contrast, Ancestry.com has more than 29 million DNA profiles, according to its website, and 23andMe has roughly 15 million.
Ancestry.com and 23andMe users who wish to make their profile visible to researchers can upload their information to GEDMatch or FamilyTreeDNA for free.
“We always depend on members of the public taking consumer genetic genealogy tests to solve any case,” Gurney said. “That’s even more important in cases of endogamy here.”
Those challenges compelled Rabbi Mendel Super, who leads Chabad of Lake Havasu City in Mojave County, Arizona — about an hour’s drive away from where the woman’s body was found in 1989 — to spread the word about the case in the Jewish community. After Super learned of the woman’s Jewish ancestry, he contacted the local sheriff’s department to offer his help.
He’s since connected authorities with experts in Jewish genealogy and is publicizing the case on social media, hoping his Jewish network can help identify a relative.
“There’s millions of people who it could be, but there’s only a few million Jews in the world, and fewer in this country,” Super told the Forward. “So I think there’s got to be someone who knows something.”
Newman, too, sees broader participation as key. She encourages Jews to share their DNA profiles, noting that researchers view far less information than many expect — just the amount of shared DNA needed to construct family trees, not a complete genetic profile. People can even upload DNA profiles anonymously, she said, giving researchers the option to contact them only if there’s a notable match.
“These people deserve dignity, to have their names,” Newman said. “It could really be you, especially in the Jewish community. You could be the one that helps solve the case and gives us her name back.”
The post Her body has been unidentified for decades. Her Ashkenazi DNA may explain why appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump announces deal with Iran is ‘now complete’
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced Sunday that a deal to end the war with Iran and reopen the Strait of Hormuz is “now complete.”
“Congratulations to all! I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and, simultaneously herewith, authorize the immediate removal of the United States Naval blockade,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!”
Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who has played a key mediating role in talks between the U.S. and Iran, also announced that a deal had been reached minutes before Trump made his post, adding that an official signing ceremony would take place Friday in Switzerland.
“Both sides have declared the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon,” Sharif wrote in a post on X.
The announcement comes more than three months since Israel and the U.S. launched its joint strikes on Iran in February. While the deal’s details have not yet been publicly announced, it is expected to extend a ceasefire between Iran and the U.S. for 60 days, during which the countries will negotiate a broader agreement addressing Iran’s nuclear program.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu did not immediately put out a statement following the announcement, but earlier Sunday he had posted a message on X celebrating Trump’s birthday.
Also earlier Sunday, Israel launched strikes on Hezbollah targets in Beirut, prompting Iran to vow retaliation and drawing a sharp rebuke from Trump, who said the strikes had “delayed the signing by a few hours.”
“Why did Bibi have to do a f–cking attack? I was so pissed off. I let him know. He has no fucking judgement. I let him know that,” Trump told Axios Sunday.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Jane Yolen, children’s book author whose ‘The Devil’s Arithmetic’ became a Holocaust classic, dies at 87
(JTA) — Jane Yolen was already an award-winning author and illustrator of more than 100 titles for young readers when her editor suggested she write a Jewish children’s book.
At first, she resisted the idea. Sure, she was Jewish. But she didn’t grow up in a religiously observant family, and she insisted she didn’t know enough about Judaism to take on the project.
Finally, she relented. Drawing on a spark of an idea about a Holocaust time-travel fantasy, Yolen turned in the first draft of what would become “The Devil’s Arithmetic,” her 1988 young adult novel. “I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to try this,’” Yolen recalled to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency years later.
The book won immediate acclaim and garnered multiple awards. Today, it’s seen as a classic of the genre — and one that remains caught up in banned-book lists.
For Yolen, who died Thursday at 87 in her home in Western Massachusetts, “The Devil’s Arithmetic” became her signature title. Still in print, the book was also made into an Emmy Award-winning Showtime feature starring Kirsten Dunst. It was the cornerstone of a titanic legacy in children’s literature, her family said in a statement.
“It is with profound sadness that I, along with my brothers, Adam Stemple, and Jason Stemple, share the news of our mother, Jane Yolen’s passing,” her daughter Heidi Stemple wrote on Facebook, adding that Yolen had “passed gently with no pain or stress” and her family by her side, reading one of her books to her.
Yolen was born on Feb. 11, 1939, in New York City. Her father was a journalist and her mother was a psychiatric social worker until Yolen was born.
An alumna of Smith College, where she won poetry and journalism awards, she worked first as an editor in New York City, writing at her breaks and time off. Her first published book, “Pirates in Petticoats,” a nonfiction work about women on the high seas, was published when she was 22.
She soon pivoted to children’s literature, becoming one of the most prolific authors in the genre. She went on to publish 450 children’s books, including more Jewish titles, and was known as “the Hans Christian Andersen of America.” She won the prestigious Caldecott Medal for her 1987 picture book, “Owl Moon,” and her “How Do Dinosaurs …” series is a staple in many preschool classrooms. (It includes one Jewish title: “How Do Dinosaurs Say Happy Chanukah?” Her 450th title was published just this year, her children said.
But it was “The Devil’s Arithmetic,” scholars have said, that cemented her legacy as a leading author for young Jews. The novel was a trailblazer for its blending of time-travel with historical veracity, according to the late Norman H. Finkelstein, a National Jewish Book award winner who was a children’s librarian himself.
“It was a different Holocaust book,” Finkelstein told JTA in 2018, on the occasion of the title’s 30th anniversary. “It was not strictly factual, it was not a memoir. Jane did a superb job in taking the story of the Holocaust down to a level that ordinary American kids could understand. The characters were realistic, not paper cutouts.”
Other titles of hers included “Meet Me at the Well: The Girls and Women of the Bible,” with Barbara Diamond Goldin, and “Jewish Fairy Tale Feasts,” with her daughter Heidi, who developed and illustrated the hands-on recipes.
Yolen relished the collaborations with her daughter. They lived next door to each other, along with Stemple’s family, with two grandchildren who were taste-testers of Stemple’s recipes.
“Jane was a treasure, and it is difficult to think of the world of books — indeed the world itself – without her,” Richard Michelson, an award-winning author of Jewish children’s books and Yolen’s friend and neighbor, wrote on Facebook. Describing her as a cherished mentor of younger writers, he added, “Jane created classics as if it were as easy as breathing.”
While often assigned in schools as part of lessons on the Holocaust, Yolen’s titles are not without controversy. In 2025 a Texas school district, using artificial intelligence, flagged “The Devil’s Arithmetic” for removal as a title containing “DEI,” or diversity, equity and inclusion content. The book became one of several well known Holocaust titles to be pulled from schools in the last few years.
Though she had initially resisted the idea of being a Holocaust author, Yolen would go on to publish a trilogy of unconventional young-adult novels about the subject. She incorporated elements of “Sleeping Beauty” into 1992’s “Briar Rose.” “Mapping the Bones” followed in 2018 as a riff on “Hansel and Gretel.”
“Whenever we think of the Holocaust, we think of remembering,” Yolen told JTA in that same 2018 interview. “We think of never forgetting. Soon all we will have are the stories.”
In addition to her children, Yolen is survived by six grandchildren. Her husband, David Stemple, to whom she was married for 44 years, died in 2006.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Jane Yolen, children’s book author whose ‘The Devil’s Arithmetic’ became a Holocaust classic, dies at 87 appeared first on The Forward.
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Hebrew Union College claims Ohio’s charity-law suit violates its First Amendment rights
(JTA) — The Reform movement’s central rabbinical seminary filed a motion to dismiss the state of Ohio’s lawsuit against the school Friday, claiming the suit violates “foundational Jewish religious doctrine.”
It was the latest escalation in a pitched battle between Hebrew Union College and the state attorney general’s office, which has accused HUC of violating nonprofit law by shuttering degree-granting programs on its historic Cincinnati campus.
The suit, HUC argues, “violates the First Amendment by entangling government and religion.”
The suit was originally filed in April by then-Ohio AG Dave Yost — his second against the college related to its controversial plan to wind down its Cincinnati operations in favor of its New York and Los Angeles campuses. Yost claimed HUC’s actions in Cincinnati misled its donors by leaving a city where they were actively fundraising to support operations, and also violated its charter, which states that the school would “permanently maintain” a residence there.
The state seeks to seize HUC’s assets in Ohio and redirect them to a new, yet-to-be-decided nonprofit with a similar mission; an upstart rabbinical school founded by HUC alums says it wants them.
Such a move “is an unconstitutional and illegal governmental assault upon religion,” HUC’s strongly worded motion reads.
It continues, “The Attorney General has no role in dictating the religious affairs of institutions like HUC. The Court should reject his overreach into religious matters and should dismiss the Complaint because it is unconstitutional and unlawful.”
HUC also argues its vote to shutter the Cincinnati campus was done in full compliance with the law, adding that it intends to maintain the campus’s other assets, including the Klau Library, the American Jewish Archives and the Skirball Museum. In addition, citing a passage in the Torah that states “God will come to his people wherever they welcome him,” the school argues that considering “Jewish demographic realities” is part of its religious mission.
“These decisions were made thoughtfully and responsibly to ensure the long-term success of the institution and our ability to continue graduating strong Jewish leaders,” HUC president Andrew Rehfeld said in a statement accompanying the motion. The lawsuit, he added, “improperly seeks to interfere in the decisions of a religious organization, and this cannot be allowed to go unchallenged.”
Yost himself resigned as AG this week to join the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group that, in 2022, represented a Tennessee adoption agency that refused to foster a child to a Jewish couple. The suit against HUC continues under the state AG’s office.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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