LOS ANGELES (AP) — If "The story of Jack and Oskar" was pitched as the script for a Hollywood movie, it's a good bet no one would believe it. 
 
 In this Nov. 25, 1979 photo, Jack Yufe, left, and his twin brother, Oskar, look on. Separated soon after birth, Jack Yufe was raised as a Jew in Trinidad while his sibling Oskar grew up in Nazi Germany... (Associated Press) 
 
 Separated sixth months after birth in 1933, Jack Yufe was raised as a Jew in his native Trinidad while his identical twin, Oskar Stohr, grew up in Nazi Germany, where he joined the Hitler Youth movement. 
 
 When the two met again at a German train station at age 21 they discovered they didn't particularly like each other. Not so much because they were different, but because they were so much alike. 
 
 Yufe, who died Monday of cancer in a San Diego hospital, had arrived for that first meeting wearing a white sports jacket, shirt and wire-rimmed glasses. So had his brother. 
 
 "I said, 'Oskar, you are wearing the same shirt and same glasses. Why?'" Yufe, who was 82, recalled in a 1999 BBC documentary. "He said to me, 'Why are you wearing the same thing that I am?'" 
 
 As they got to know each other better they would learn they also walked with the same gait, had the same nervous habits, even liked to play the same practical jokes on people. 
 
 "They both used to wash their hands before and after going to the toilet," recalled Nancy L. Segal, a professor of psychology at California State University, Fullerton, who studied the brothers as part of a landmark study of twins conducted at the University of Minnesota. 
 
 "They both used to like to sneeze loudly in elevators, thinking that was funny," she continued. "If you sat across from them at a table and there was a vase with a rose or something, they would both shove it aside because they couldn't stand that." 
 
 They also shared the same hot temper and competitive drive, which led them to learn not to ever talk politics or religion, Yufe's son, Kenneth, said Wednesday. 
 
 "It was an interesting pair to watch, for sure," he added. 
 
 The two were separated when their parents split and their mother took Oskar to her native Germany while Jack stayed in Trinidad with their father. In his teens, Yufe moved to Israel where he served in the navy before moving to the United States and going into the retail business in San Diego. 
 
 "When he first started he was selling out of a van, and he'd see people who had no shoes or horrible shoes and he'd say, "Here's a pair of boots, give me a dollar a week, that sort of thing," the son recalled. "He'd give credit to people who never had credit before." 
 
 But if the buyer didn't pay that dollar a week, his son recalled with a laugh, he'd demand those boots back. 
 
 "He was very old school, but he really was a wonderful guy." 
 
 It was in San Diego that Yufe's first wife learned of the landmark Minnesota Twins Study and persuaded her husband and brother-in-law to take part. They and others showed remarkable similarities despite growing up apart from one another for decades. 
 
 "As psychologists, it made us really rethink our explanations for behavior," said Segal. 
 
 Yufe and Stohr, meanwhile, came to care deeply for one another, said the psychologist, who got to know both over the 20-year study and wrote about them in her books "Born Together — Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study" and "Indivisible by Two: Lives of Extraordinary Twins." 
 
 When Stohr died of cancer in 1997, she said, Yufe was devastated but couldn't bring himself to attend the funeral because he looked so much like his brother that he feared it would disturb the family. 
 
 "They had an amazing, what I would call a love-hate relationship," she said. "They were fascinated by one another, fascinated by their similarities, intrigued that the worst traits that they saw in themselves were mirrored in the other one. They were hot tempered and short tempered and impatient, demanding. But their families loved them." 
 
 In addition to his wife, Ruth, and son, Kenneth, Yufe is survived by daughters Anita Yufe, Hovi Reader and Debvra Gregory and stepsons Renee and Enrique Vega. ||||| Separated soon after birth, Jack Yufe, left, was raised as a Jew in Trinidad while his sibling Oskar Stohr, right, grew up in Nazi Germany where he joined the Hitler Youth. (Robert Lachman/Los Angeles Times via AP) 
 
 Jack Yufe grew up missing his other half, an identical twin brother from whom he had been separated at six months. 
 
 For years, they exchanged letters and photographs. Then, at age 21, they met at a German train station. The encounter was detailed in psychologist Nancy Segal’s book “Indivisible by Two: Lives of Extraordinary Twins.” 
 
 Yufe and his brother, Oskar Stohr, examined one another as if they were looking at alien specimens, though no likeness could have been more familiar to either of them. Their cultural differences were as immediately apparent as their physical similarities. Casting a wary eye at Yufe’s Israeli luggage tags, Stohr removed them and told his long-lost brother to tell others he was coming from America. 
 
 From this first uneasy exchange in 1954 grew a complex but enduring bond that would bring Yufe and Stohr to the center of discussions about nature and nurture. After all, the differences between the brothers’ upbringings were more extreme than those experienced by most twins separated by circumstance. 
 
 Yufe grew up Jewish in Trinidad and became an officer in the Israeli Navy. Stohr grew up Catholic in Nazi Germany and became an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth. 
 
 Yufe died Monday of cancer in a San Diego hospital, the Associated Press reports. He was 82. 
 
 Stohr passed away in 1997, also of cancer. 
 
 The brothers’ unique relationship was a source of fascination for the researchers behind the landmark Minnesota twin study conducted from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. Seeking to identify how environmental and genetic factors contributed to psychological traits, the study closely examined the behaviors of sets of twins who were separated early in their lives and raised by different families. 
 
 What made Yufe and Stohr an extraordinary case was not only the stark contrasts between the cultures in which they grew up — Nazism versus Judaism — but also the striking similarities in their habits and emotional temperaments. 
 
 In 1933, Yufe and Stohr were born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, to a Romanian Jewish father and a German Catholic mother. According to Segal, it’s not known whether the couple was ever married, and their relationship quickly soured “as a result of [the father’s] ‘roving eyes’ and excessive drinking.” 
 
 The twins’ mother returned to her native Germany with Stohr and an older daughter in tow, while Yufe remained in Trinidad as a British subject. Meanwhile, Stohr became a subject of the German Reich and a member of the Hitler Youth, a cause he took on with enthusiasm. 
 
 The Los Angeles Times reports that Stohr confessed years later to having dreamt of shooting his twin in an aerial dogfight. On the other hand, Yufe had a nightmare about killing his brother with a bayonet. 
 
 Their stark cultural, political and religious differences were what initially made them the stars of headlines such as “Twins: Nazi and Jew” and snapshots that featured the Jewish star printed above one brother and a swastika above the other. 
 
 “But that’s too simple,” Segal wrote of the pair. “That’s not how it was.” 
 
 Once Yufe and Stohr started discovering their shared idiosyncrasies, those seemed even more peculiar than what set them apart. 
 
 The first meeting — when Yufe visited Stohr, his mother and her side of the family in Germany — was awkward. Yufe recalled to Segal, “We saw each other as enemies, neither one of us would change. We looked at each other with suspicion.” Then, on a boat trip they took together on the Rhine River, Jack had hoped to have some private time with Stohr, “but he was so unfriendly, and he was not trying to hide it. He kept covering his eyes with his hand.” 
 
 After six days, they parted ways with just a cold handshake. They wouldn’t see each other for another 25 years. 
 
 It was the Minnesota twin study that ultimately brought them back together. Yufe told the Los Angeles Times in 1979, “I thought it perhaps would be a good idea…to meet in a neutral territory to hash out all this, all the hidden feelings.” 
 
 The revelations began when they met at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. As it so happens, both were wearing the same outfit: a white sports jacket, shirt and wire-rimmed glasses. 
 
 “I said, ‘Oskar, you are wearing the same shirt and same glasses. Why?'” Yufe recalled in a 1999 BBC documentary. “He said to me, ‘Why are you wearing the same thing that I am?'” 
 
 The similarities soon piled on, with startling specificity: both read books from back to front, sneezed loudly in elevators, wrapped rubber bands around their wrists, flushed toilets before and after using them and wore tight bathing suits. 
 
 Segal explains in “Indivisible by Two” that some of these peculiar commonalities could be explained by genetics. The toilet-flushing, for instance, likely had to do with the brothers’ sensitivity to germs. 
 
 In later years, their wives noticed that they walked, and even tripped, in a similar fashion. 
 
 Still, some differences persisted. They could never agree on Israel and Palestine, for instance, or who was responsible for World War II. Segal writes, “Oskar’s repeated reference to German soldiers as ‘we’ infuriated Jack.” 
 
 After a stint in the Israeli army, Yufe eventually settled in San Diego and became the owner of a retail store called “El Progresso.” Stohr stayed in Germany, working as a miner and electrical welder. 
 
 “They had an amazing, what I would call a love-hate relationship,” Yufe’s wife, Ruth, told the AP. “They were fascinated by one another, fascinated by their similarities, intrigued that the worst traits that they saw in themselves were mirrored in the other one. They were hot-tempered and short-tempered and impatient, demanding. But their families loved them.” 
 
 Yufe’s son, Kenneth, described his father to the AP as “very old school,” but a “wonderful guy.” 
 
 Yufe is also survived by daughters Anita Yufe, Hovi Reader and Debvra Gregory, as well as stepsons Renee and Enrique Vega. 
 
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 Menachem Bodner last saw his twin brother at age 4, when he was liberated from the infamous Auschwitz laboratory of Dr. Josef Mengele. Now, armed with proof that his brother also survived, he’s watching his search go viral online. 
 
 It’s most likely that Menachem Bodner last saw his identical twin in 1945, in Dr. Josef Mengele’s gruesome Auschwitz laboratory. He was 4 then and doesn’t remember his time in the notorious death camp. But in the 68 years that have followed, Bodner says he’s “always” been certain he was one of a pair. He just didn’t have any proof until this past year. Now, he’s searching for Jeno, a man who probably looks just like him, and who has a distinctive “A-7734” tattoo on his forearm. And 1 million Facebook users are helping him look. 
 
 Mengele, known among prisoners as “the Angel of Death,” was deeply fascinated with twins and used them for research experiments in his macabre Auschwitz lab. Thankfully, Bodner, now 72, has no recollection of the cruelty he most certainly endured while undergoing experiments, though he can remember a sense of paralyzing fear. Unfortunately he also has few impressions of his family’s prewar life in a small town east of Munkacs, Hungary, which is now in the Ukraine. But despite the lack of memories from a war-marred childhood, Bodner says that throughout his life he’s felt a deep connection with his twin—and is positive he’s still alive and out there. But where? 
 
 Until last May, Bodner didn’t even know that his own name was once Elias Gottesmann. Now he knows that. And he knows for certain that he has a twin—thanks to the Nazis’ dogged, pathological documentation of their crimes. Ayana KimRon, a professional genealogist in Israel, found the evidence, clearly written in a record put together by the organization Candles, of twins who were “identified as having been liberated at Auschwitz or from a subcamp”: 
 
 A-7733, Gottesmann, Elias, 4 
 
 A-7734, Gottesmann, Jeno, 4 
 
 
 
 KimRon got onto the case after spotting a posting made on a genealogical forum by a cousin of Bodner’s partner, seeking information about the long-missing brother. When the woman was unable to answer KimRon’s questions, Bodner ended up calling the curious researcher himself. “I was hooked,” KimRon says of that first call. “I said, ‘Look I’m going all the way with you,’ and it turned out to be the project of my life.” Bodner, a retired Israeli tax-service employee living in the Tel Aviv suburb of Rishon LeZion, was dubious at first, but KimRon began digging anyway. She asked him if he had any sense of his brother, and he told her, “All my life I’ve known that he was alive somewhere; I felt that he was alive.” 
 
 In early March, after months of dead-end trails and fruitless posts within the Jewish and genealogical communities online, KimRon decided the campaign needed a broader audience. She created a Facebook page titled “A7734,” posted a black-and-white shot of a young boy and a caption with his tattoo number, and asked for any clues into his whereabouts. Within 24 hours it had gone viral, and a within a week, the photo has had 23,000 shares, 1.13 million views, and hundreds of comments from readers offering resources, prayers, and words of encouragement. Other twins pledged to help. Amateur etymologists traced their names. One man even attempted to age the photo into what Jeno (known by his nickname Jolli) might look like now. 
 
 Courtesy of Menachem Bodner Menachem Bodner at age 5 after World War II (left) and in the present day. 
 
 “I was astonished by the amount of comments, and I’m very grateful for each and every one one of them,” Bodner, who speaks Hebrew, says of the rapid response. Before talking to The Daily Beast, he and KimRon had been watching the page, mesmerized as the comments and countries rolled in: China, Argentina, Ireland, Portugal, Finland. The success is galvanizing, and Facebook is just the beginning. “I’m going to maximize the Internet,” KimRon says, explaining that her next plan is to build a YouTube channel of Bodner speaking (a Twitter account launched Sunday night). 
 
 In 1945, as allied troops advanced into Poland and the Germans fled Auschwitz—the most notorious of Nazi death camps—a boy approached a young Jewish man searching for his family and asked: “Will you be my father?” When the man asked his name, young Elias Gottesmann took a guess, saying his first name was Mendele and giving a similar-sounding last name. More than a half-century later, he laughs and shrugs when asked how he came up with that new name. 
 
 As the pair walked out of the camp a few days later, they saw a battalion of Soviet soldiers approaching. “I don’t like them,” he told the man. “They didn’t save my brother, Jolli.” Five years later, the ramshackle family moved to Israel. When Bodner turned 20, his adoptive parents told him about those words. Despite searching through Jewish agencies and publishing requests, searches using the name Bodner had yielded no clues about the fate of his brother. 
 
 But when KimRon ran the unique tattoo number through the Red Cross records, she soon found the proof of the twin Bodner always knew existed. In a hospital record dated February 9, 1945—nearly two weeks after Auschwitz was liberated—his brother’s name shows up. Ironically, as Bodner lived with his adoptive family in a neighboring camp, Jolli was just inside those infamous gates. KimRon explains why Bodner never searched for himself or his brother using the inked numbers on his arm: “That’s the symbol of turning human beings into numbers,” she says. “People don’t want to relate to it.” She utilized it because she realized it was the only way past the dead-end trails. 
 
 Patricia Heberer, a historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and author of Children During the Holocaust, explains that twins studied by Mengele were housed together in barracks, underwent daily physical examination, and received surgeries or experimentations as a pair. “Experimentation included injections that caused pain or disease, spinal taps and spinal injections, and deliberate infection with certain diseases,” she says. Surgeries were even more gruesome. 
 
 Because of Mengele’s secretive nature (he “destroyed much of the documentation about his ‘research efforts’ in his effort to avoid capture,” Heberer says), many twin survivors, like Jeno and Elias, have spent the rest of their lives unaware of the nature of their experimentation and suffer serious health consequences as well. 
 
 Along with historical records, KimRon found a flock of nearly 70 extended family members both in Israel and the U.S for a man who believed he had no blood relatives. Many of them had searched for Bodner for years. “I was shocked,“ he says. “I thought that nobody would look for me. I had a dream to find someone. It made my dreams come true.” Within less than a year, Bodner has quickly assimilated into his family, and KimRon, who has found herself as part of the clan, says that the relatives “embrace as if they were together since birth.” Bodner speaks to his new cousins weekly, and they’ve spent the past year’s holidays together. “I’m still memorizing the names,” he says with a laugh. 
 
 The enigmatic connection between family members who spend years separated is well documented. Nancy Segal, a psychology professor at California State University, Fullerton, and director of the Twin Studies Center, has spent years researching twin connections. She says that even after decades apart, many twins still find they have similar attitudes, values, and interests upon reuniting. “Sometimes circumstances of rearing and living can get in the way,” she wrote in an email. “But even some who met in their sixties and seventies did well together.” 
 
 Despite the skepticism he had going in to the search, Bodner has been eager to soak up his newfound history. “This man has quick digestion. He wants to face the demons,” KimRon says reverently. In June—just a month after learning of his family—Bodner traveled to his small hometown in what is now Ukraine, but was once Hungary. When he arrived, an old woman approached the group, looking at the house they were eyeing. She still recalled his family. “In this house there were twins,” she told them. Bodner, too, remembered the house and the Gestapo officers who came to take them from it two months before his fourth birthday. “I remember when Nazis came to take us: it was midday, I was outside, and my brother was asleep in bed,” he says. “I saw them coming.” 
 
 This June, Bodner, KimRon and four family members plan to make a trip back to Auschwitz, the death camp that once housed him, his brother, and his mother (a survivor who was murdered a year after the Holocaust while searching for her sons). The last time he was there was just a few weeks after liberation, when a Jewish journalist asked Bodner and his adoptive father to take him. As they approached the gates, the 5-year-old panicked. “I don’t want to go there,” he screamed. “They turn people to dust in there; I don’t want to go there.”
– A California man named Jack Yufe died this week at age 82, and his life story is so fascinating that the AP likens it to a Hollywood script nobody would believe; the Los Angeles Times draws a comparison to a "tabloid headline." The reason? Yufe was born in Trinidad along with an identical twin brother, but their parents split after 6 months. Yufe grew up as a Jew, even serving a stint in the Israeli navy. Brother Oskar Stohr, meanwhile, went to Germany with his Catholic mom and grew up as a Nazi, becoming a member of the Hitler Youth. They managed to stay in touch and met again at age 21. The weird part? Despite their incredibly different backgrounds, they were alike in nearly every way. They dressed the same (both showed up to their first meeting in a white sports jacket and wire-rimmed glasses), walked the same, wore the same mustache, and had the same temperament and quirks. They both liked to sneeze loudly to scare people as a joke, and "both used to wash their hands before and after going to the toilet," says Nancy Segal, a professor of psychology who studied the pair as part of a well-known study of separated twins at the University of Minnesota. The brothers' story eventually rose to "the center of discussions about nature and nurture," notes the Washington Post. Though the brothers didn't much like each other at first, that changed over the years. When Stohr died of cancer in 1997, a devastated Yufe didn't attend the funeral, however, notes AP. They looked so much alike he was afraid it would upset loved ones. (A survivor of the Nazi death camps' only mass escape also recently died.)