![]() ![]() He said he started looking at people he encountered in the world for a face that looked like his. “I spent about two years, every day, thinking about this. He said Louise Wise Services told him that New York law didn’t allow the agency to reveal the identity of his brother, and so he was left in limbo, unable to locate his sibling. “She said, ‘You have an identical twin brother,’ and I’m like, ‘Well, thanks for telling me that.’ After, I was shocked, but, you know, just how do I find that person? Because that’s what I wanted to do,” Burack said. He said someone called him from the agency and told him the shocking news. It was in 1998, when he was 35 years old and unaware that he was a twin, that Burack wrote to Louise Wise Services asking for information about his biological parents. ![]() The entire time, the families said, they were unaware that the child they had adopted was a twin and that they were being studied to test how identical twins would fare growing up in different homes.īurack said that the researchers were still coming to his house when he was 11 or 12 years old, and that at one point, he said he no longer wanted to participate in their research. ![]() I’m like, ‘Can I go now?’” Doug Rausch told “20/20.”įor a decade - and longer, in some cases - the children and their adoptive families said they were visited by those mysterious researchers. But you know, you get bored with that pretty quick. “They would film me and they would make me ride my bike and they would, you know, do this test and that test and I mean it was kind of fun for me at the time, I don’t know. “I would have to say what, what did I think that picture was.” You know, they would show me different pictures,” Morello said. “I do remember just a person coming and I remember like looking at books. The babies in the study are all adults now, but many said they have flashes of memories of odd, intrusive visits from nosy strangers throughout their early childhood, poking into their lives, questioning, testing and filming. We don't know his background, but it never dawned on me why they're coming back so many times,” Helen Rausch said during an interview for “The Twinning Reaction.” Here, we're adopting a child we don't know. “They made it sound like this was to everybody's benefit to see how smart this kid is, because I don't know him. He told ABC News’ “20/20” that his parents adopted him when he was a baby from Louise Wise Services, a prominent New York City Jewish adoption agency in the 1960s.īut Burack's view of himself as a normal adoptee was shattered when, in his 30s, he made a routine inquiry to the adoption agency, requesting his birth records, and was told that somewhere in the world he had an identical twin brother. “I grew up in a nice, upper-middle-class family in a nice, suburban area north of New York City, in Rockland County, and normal childhood, normal whatever, great parents,” said Burack, who was born in 1963. Howard Burack always knew he was adopted. Editor’s note: After our original “20/20” report aired on March 9, 2018, the Jewish Board sent written apologies to the twins who appeared in our program, saying in part, “We recently watched the ‘20/20’ telecast about the separation of twins and we’re deeply moved by the comments you made … we realize that our efforts have fallen short, and that we can and should do more… we feel we must reach out, acknowledge our past error, and set a new moral course for the future.” Some of the twins from the study have since accepted the Jewish Board’s invitation to start a dialogue to “…begin the task of repairing past wrongs and making them right.” ![]()
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