TRINI TWINS, ONE JEWISH, THE OTHER RAISED AS A NAZi

​Jack Yufe, founder of Yufe's haberdashery store in Trinidad and Tobago, had an unusual life that attracted international attention.
Yufe had an identical twin brother Oskar Stohr, and the two had radically different lives that may well be suited to a movie.
Born in Trinidad in January 1933, Yufe and Stohr were separated at six months old, when their parents divorced.
Yufe stayed in Trinidad with their Jewish father, Joseph, who was Jewish, while Stohr moved to Germany with their Catholic mother, Elizabeth, and grew up as the Nazis rose to power.
Yufe was raised Jewish, and contributed to the landscape of T&T's textile industry.
He eventually joined the Israeli Navy, worked on a kibbutz, and moved with his father to San Diego, USA, to run a small store.
Stohr was raised Catholic, kept his Jewish ancestry a secret. Like his fellow students, he greeted the school principal with "Heil, Hitler," and was warned by his grandmother to never let on that his father was Jewish. As an act of survival, Stohr joined the Hitler Youth movement, an organisation for young people in the Nazi Party
According to the Los Angeles Times, Yufe reuinted with his long-lost twin in 1954 when he traveled to Germany to find Stohr.
The two found they had very similar habits, mannerisms, hairstyles and style of dress. But they spoke no common language and were unable to communicate well.
Yufe found out enough to tell the LA Times that Stohr avoided letting anti-Semitic family members know his brother was Jewish and had been in Israel.
He said that upon arriving in Germany, Storh told him to remove his name tags from his luggage and hide his Jewish identity for the duration of his stay. Yufe lasted a week in Germany before packing up and going home.
The two did not meet again until 1979, when Yufe learned about a University of Minnesota study about twins, and wanted to participate.
In addition, Yufe and Stohr were featured in other films about twins, according to the Times.
Of all the twins who participated in the Minnesota study, Yufe and Stohr had the most contrasting backgrounds.
“Jack and his brother clearly have the greatest differences in background I’ve ever seen among identical twins reared apart,” Thomas J. Bouchard Jr., the University of Minnesota psychologist who headed the study, told The Times in 1979.
After some time, their families noticed, they began to form a bond that was close to something brotherly. At least, they said, the hate seemed to subside.
However, their upbringings never stopped being a problem. Over time they just learned to avoid topics like religion and the war.
Cal State Fullerton psychology professor Nancy Segal wrote a book on the brothers aptly titled “Indivisible by Two: Lives of Extraordinary Twins.”
Segal told the Times that the twins had an “extraordinary love-hate relationship”.
Eventually, Yufe said he learned not to blame his brother for the circumstances that landed them on opposite sides of a deadly war.
Yufe reportedly told Segal that he did not blame his brother for participating in the Hitler Youth.
"Children have no say in what they are taught", he said. "If we had been switched, I would have taken Oskar's place for sure."
Stohr, who had worked in coal mines, died of lung cancer in 1997 at age 64.
Yufe died of stomach cancer in San Diego in 2015 at age 82.
PHOTO: Jack Yufe, left, with his identical brother Oskar. Robert Lachman/Los Angeles Times/AP
Sources:
www.haaretz.com 
www.losangelestimes.com 
www.independent.co.uk 
http://allthatsinteresting.com
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The first group of Jews in Trinidad arrived in 1783 with the Cedula of Population, when Trinidad – an underpopulated Spanish colony – opened its borders to Europeans. 
The second group came in when slavery was abolished in 1838.
The third wave of Jewish immigration occurred during and after World War II when European Jews were fleeing the the Nazis. Many of them held German and Austrian passports.