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For Judith Yoblick of Edison, giving a cheek swab of DNA at Congregation Beth-El on Sunday was a unique opportunity her mother never had after surviving the Holocaust.

Yoblick's mother was taken away to concentration camps six times, but because of her Austrian appearance and ability to speak German, she managed to escape every time by convincing guards she wasn't Jewish. But her parents never left Vienna, and the family never found out where they were taken during World War II.

After adding to the genetic database of the DNA Shoah Project, which is attempting to reconnect survivors and their families to lost relatives, Yoblick said it never hit her until her mother's funeral in 1987 that she knew where her mother was, but her mother never knew the same about her parents.

"It would be like closing a chapter for my mother," Yoblick told The Jewish State, regarding the possibility of the DNA Shoah Project connecting her with relatives.

At Beth-El in Edison, project co-founder Syd Mandelbaum spoke about his efforts, and facilitators collected DNA samples from attendees, who also submitted information sheets on their families to help the matching process. Next fall, Mandelbaum expects the project to have a large enough sample size to begin comparing individuals' DNA.

"We are trying to bring together families, and it's a project that could not have been done even five years ago because technology had not caught up with the Jewish neshama (soul)," Mandelbaum told the crowd.

When Mandelbaum and his father went to the first world gathering of Holocaust survivors, in Jerusalem in 1981, Mandelbaum said he told his father "Dad, I feel like I have to go back to America and change the world."

At that point, Mandelbaum began videotaping the testimony of Holocaust survivors and concentration camp liberators, a project that was continued by Steven Spielberg in 1994.

In 2005, Mandelbaum read an online article about 27 bodies turning up at the Stuttgart Airport, bodies that Germany admitted were not missing people -- meaning they must have been Holocaust survivors, Mandelbaum said. Mandelbaum called the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Israel, and when they said they had no DNA database, Mandelbaum said to himself: "I could do that."

Mandelbaum then teamed with Dr. Michael Hammer at the University of Arizona, whose research demonstrated that present-day kohanim are descended from a single male ancestor, and in 2007 Howard Cash, president of Gene Code Forensics, Inc., donated his DNA matching software to the project. That -- coupled with genetic markers that allowed Mandelbaum to go forward three generations in DNA testing, up to the grandchildren of survivors -- really got the project off the ground, he said.

Genetic markers, genes or DNA sequences with a known location on a chromosome and associated with a particular gene or trait, are critical to the project because "each one of us in this room is 99.6 percent the exact same," Mandelbaum said.

Mandelbaum explained that as roads and other projects are built in Europe, more and more of the four million corpses from the Holocaust that are under the ground will continue to turn up. But Mandelbaum affirmed that his project does not intend to go into graves or dig up bodies for DNA sampling.

Instead, Mandelbaum said he will continue to focus on DNA sampling with non-intrusive kits, and hearing the "genetic testimony" of survivors. He said he wishes he could have done this project 30 years ago, when far more survivors were alive, but that he now must work with the tools that modern technology has provided him.

During a question-and-answer session, Sol Lurie of Monroe said that he couldn't talk about the Holocaust until seven years ago, when Spielberg taped him, but that "now they can't shut me up."

Of Lurie's 10 siblings, five moved to America before the war and the other five survived concentration camps, he told The Jewish State. His mother was killed two days before liberation. Separated from all his family members, Lurie was sent to a French orphanage upon liberation from Buchenwald before the American Red Cross connected him with cousins in New York. Lurie's father, liberated from Dachau, went back to Lithuania (then part of the Soviet Union) with one of his sons.

"I didn't know my father and brother survived until a year-and-a-half [after the war]," Lurie said.

That was 1946, when Lurie's father and brother, who weren't allowed to leave Lithuania, wrote a letter to Lurie's aunt in New York. In 1968, Lurie's father was finally allowed to visit the U.S. for a six-month stay before returning to Europe.

Alexander Goodman of Clark was born during the war in Uzbekistan in 1942, as his parents escaped Poland in the spring of 1940. Due to that escape, Goodman's family wasn't sent searching for any displaced relatives.

"Everyone is accounted for," Goodman told The Jewish State.

"Everyone out of Warsaw, Poland, if they didn't leave, you know your family was wiped out," he added. "There were no ifs, ands, or buts about it."

For Eileen Edelstein of New Brunswick, the concept of the DNA Shoah Project hit home in a different way. In her field, called skip tracing, Edelstein locates unpaid stock and dividend holders and tries to contact them through old phone books. Edelstein found that many of the stockholders were deceased, grew curious about her family's history, and in a 1933 Brooklyn phonebook discovered her grandmother's identity for the first time by connecting her Hebrew name (Yacha) to the name Yetta Fruchtman, wife of her grandfather Louis Fruchtman, whose name she already knew.

"I know I'm a mishmash from a variety of different places, but I'd like to know where my family came from," Edelstein told The Jewish State.

Beth-El officials stressed that the event was an important way of spreading the word about the DNA Shoah Project, to help Mandelbaum's database continue to grow.

"We hope that the publicity that this event will create in the community will have more people interested [in the DNA Shoah Project]," Rabbi Dr. Bernhard Rosenberg told The Jewish State.