Children separated at birth, studied in secret.

What the study was

The research program now known as the Neubauer twin study was led by the psychoanalyst Peter B. Neubauer at the Child Development Center, an affiliate of the Jewish Board of Guardians (later the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services). It was designed in collaboration with Viola W. Bernard, a Columbia psychiatrist who served as a consultant to Louise Wise Services, the Jewish adoption agency that referred the subject children.

Identical twins and triplets surrendered at birth were placed in separate adoptive homes as a matter of policy. The adoptive parents were told their child was part of an ongoing “child development study” — a routine follow-up by the agency. They were never told their child had a sibling.

For years afterward, researchers visited the homes. They administered IQ tests, recorded interviews, filmed the children at play, and tracked behavioral milestones. Each subject was being measured against a sibling none of them knew existed.

How it came to light

The study was never published. It was meant to remain a private collection of data inside an institution. It surfaced only because the world was smaller than the researchers planned for.

In 1980, a nineteen-year-old named Bobby Shafran arrived at Sullivan County Community College in upstate New York and was greeted by strangers calling him “Eddy.” Eddy Galland had attended the school the previous year. The two met. A newspaper story ran. A third young man, David Kellman, saw the photograph and recognized himself. They were triplets, separated as infants by the same agency, placed in three different households, and observed without their knowledge.

Their reunion broke the silence. Other separated twins began surfacing — sometimes through chance encounters, sometimes through the agency itself reluctantly disclosing the existence of a sibling decades later. Paula Bernstein and Elyse Schein met for the first time as grown women in 2003 and wrote a book about it. The 2018 documentary Three Identical Strangers brought the story to a much wider public.

It was a clear violation of accepted ethical practice. There was no informed consent and no opportunity to give informed consent. — Dr. Leon Hoffman, child psychiatrist, on the study

Why this site exists

This is not a neutral chronicle. The Neubauer study should not have happened. Once it had, every subject deserved to know — promptly, completely, and on their own terms — what had been done to them and what had been recorded about them. That has not happened. Many of the people who were studied still do not know. Some have died without learning they were part of an experiment. The records that could give the survivors the rest of their own histories remain locked in a vault at Yale until 2065.

The position of this archive is straightforward: the records should be opened to the surviving subjects and their families now, with appropriate care for privacy of any third parties named in them, and the institutional successors of the study — Yale University and the Jewish Board — should make that opening their priority.

Until then, this archive collects what is publicly known: who ran the study, who funded it, who was studied, what survivors have said about it, what documentaries and journalism have uncovered, and what arguments are being made for the records’ release. Every claim is sourced. Where the public record is incomplete, this site says so plainly.