Alanis Morissette discovers family’s Holocaust past

Singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette learned about a painful chapter in her Jewish family’s past during last night’s season premiere of Finding Your Roots, an American documentary series that explores celebrities’ genealogy.

Thanks to records that the Finding Your Roots team discovered at Yad Vashem, Morissette learned that both of her grandfather’s siblings Gyorgy and Sandor Feuerstein died in Soviet slave labour camps during the Holocaust and that her grandfather, Imre Feuerstein, made inquiries to the Red Cross to find them.

The seven-time Grammy Award winner and rock sensation of the 90s told Finding Your Roots host and Harvard University history professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. that she came late to her Judaism, having only learned about her family’s Jewish origins when she was in her 20s.

Born in Canada to a Hungarian mother whose parents were both Holocaust survivors, Morissette, 49, explained that her mother and grandmother’s decision to hide the family’s Jewishness was probably due to “a terror that is in their bones”: “They were being protective of us and just not wanting antisemitism.”