Czech tracks Kerry’s Jewish roots

HORNI BENESOV, Czech Republic — What began for genealogist Felix Gundacker as a brief assignment from an American newspaper has become a yearlong obsession — tracking Sen. John Kerry’s Jewish family roots in this forlorn Moravian village.

“I did nearly nothing else the past year — it was fascinating,” Mr. Gundacker said in an interview Monday. “It was interesting to learn the circumstances” of why the family changed its name from Kohn to Kerry and eventually moved to the United States.

The story, unraveled by Mr. Gundacker at the behest of the Boston Globe, has turned up several surprises, not least that Mr. Kerry’s paternal grandfather was born into a Jewish family as Friedrich “Fritz” Kohn and converted to Roman Catholicism as a young man in the face of rampant anti-Semitism.

Two cousins whose branch of the family remained Jews died in Nazi concentration camps while others survived the Holocaust.

And, according to family lore, the name Kerry was chosen entirely by chance when Fritz Kohn’s elder brother dropped a pencil on a map and it landed on County Kerry, Ireland.

“This is amazing. That is fascinating to me,” Mr. Kerry told the Globe last year as the results of Mr. Gundacker’s research were published. Mr. Kerry did not respond to telephone calls and e-mails seeking comment for this article.

Mr. Gundacker said he has been besieged with inquiries since Mr. Kerry emerged as the almost-certain Democratic challenger in the U.S. presidential election this year, but the genealogist’s interest in the family has little to do with American politics.

“My interest to learn more was not the fact that he was a senator, but to learn more of the history — what the Jewish families did here,” he said.

Manfred Kerry, 39, whose great-grandfather Otto was a brother of the senator’s grandfather, said in an interview that the family had long known that there were relatives in the United States but had not tried to contact them.

“If you haven’t had contact for several decades, why contact them? The distances were much larger then,” said Mr. Kerry, who is a deputy mayor in the Josefstadt section of Vienna, Austria.

Like much of Europe, this corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was afflicted with the most virulent forms of anti-Semitism when Fritz came of age around the turn of the 20th century, according to Charles Gati, a European studies professor at the Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.

“There was the blood charge — that Jews sucked the blood out of young children,” Mr. Gati said. The situation was so overwhelming that many Jews simply abandoned their faith.

“You don’t want yourself and your children to face all those problems — it’s just not worth it,” Mr. Gati said. “It seems like cowardice today, but it was survival.”

Fritz was 3 years old when his father, Benedikt, died in 1876. His mother, Mathilde, moved soon afterward to Vienna with him, his nine-year-old sister Ida, and a newborn brother, Otto.

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