The Jewish Board.

Note: the adoption-side records of Louise Wise Services were not transferred to the Jewish Board. They were transferred to Spence-Chapin Services to Families and Children, a separate New York adoption agency that has been their custodian since the 2004 closure of Louise Wise. Adoptees seeking confirmation of their adoption history should begin there. See the Spence-Chapin entry on this site.

What the Jewish Board is

The Jewish Board today is one of the largest nonprofit mental-health and human-service organizations in the New York region. It runs clinics, residential programs, family-support services, school-based mental-health work, and other programs across the five boroughs and beyond. The bulk of its work has nothing to do with adoption, and nothing to do with the twin study. Most of its present-day staff had no role in either institution it inherited from.

That contemporary scale and reputation matter for two reasons. First, they make plain that the Jewish Board is not a residual paper entity but a working institution with public standing, ongoing relationships with state regulators and academic medical centers, and the capacity to act on archival questions if it chooses. Second, they raise the bar for what a credible institutional response to the twin study would look like. A small inheriting body might reasonably plead limited capacity. The Jewish Board cannot.

The inheritance from the Jewish Board of Guardians

The 1978 merger that produced today’s Jewish Board folded the Jewish Board of Guardians — the older, century-spanning Jewish welfare organization that had operated the Child Development Center — into a new combined entity. The Center itself continued operating, in different organizational form, for years afterward; it was an active program at the time the merger occurred and did not stop with it. The merged organization was therefore the institutional home of the Center during the closing years of the twin study’s active period, and is the organizational successor that holds whatever institutional records of the Center survived and were not deposited at Yale.

This is the line of inheritance that matters for the research-side records. Most of the substantive material went to Yale’s Manuscripts and Archives, in Sterling Memorial Library, in 1990, under the deed-of-gift terms that produced the seal — the Jewish Board itself was the formal donor. The Board, as the surviving organizational successor to the Center’s parent and to the donor of the deed, is the body whose cooperation Yale would need to seek if the deed were to be amended.

What the Jewish Board does not hold

It is worth being precise about a point that is widely confused in the public record. The Jewish Board does not hold the adoption-side records of Louise Wise Services. When Louise Wise closed in 2004, its adoption files were transferred to Spence-Chapin Services to Families and Children, a separate New York adoption agency, which has been their custodian since. An adoptee seeking confirmation of their Louise Wise adoption history — including any sibling information that may be in the file — begins at Spence-Chapin, not at the Jewish Board.

The Jewish Board’s relevance to subjects of the study runs through a different line: the institutional inheritance of the Child Development Center, where the research was conducted. That puts the Board on the research-record side of the matter, not the adoption-record side.

Public position on the study

The Jewish Board’s public engagement with the twin study has, broadly, three phases.

Before 2017, the Board did not publicly engage with the study at length. Its work on the inherited adoption records was handled through standard post-adoption services channels and was not framed, in public, as part of any larger institutional reckoning with the program.

From 2017 onward, after the release of The Twinning Reaction and especially after Three Identical Strangers in 2018, the Board began making more substantive public statements. In the period following the 2018 documentary’s wide release, the Board agreed — together with Yale — to release portions of the research records to identified subjects who requested them. The releases have been redacted and limited to material about the requester, but they represent the first sustained acknowledgment that the inherited records carry obligations the Board can and should act on.

The Board’s present position, as articulated in those public statements, has emphasized cooperation with Yale on subject-initiated requests rather than advocacy for a broader unsealing. The Board has not, as of this archive’s writing, called publicly for an amendment to the deed of gift, for the release of the collection to identified subjects on standing terms, or for opening the archive to qualified researchers. The current arrangement is what the Board has described, in effect, as adequate.

What this archive asks of the Jewish Board

The Jewish Board did not design the twin study. It did not seal the records. The decisions that produced today’s situation were made by people inside two predecessor institutions, several decades ago, on terms the Board inherited rather than chose. The position of this archive is not that the Board is responsible for the original wrong. It is that the Board is one of three institutional actors — alongside Yale and the surviving subjects — whose action could change what the inherited situation produces from here.

Concretely, the Board is asked to:

1. State a public position on the records’ status. Beyond cooperation with case-by-case subject requests, what does the Board believe the right institutional disposition of the Yale collection is? The absence of a stated position has functioned as a position. Saying so plainly, in public, would advance the conversation.
2. Advocate for an amended deed of gift at Yale. As the donor’s practical institutional successor, the Board is the body whose cooperation Yale would need to amend the access terms. A public request from the Board to Yale, asking for a wider opening, would carry weight Yale alone cannot generate.
3. Release any institutional records of the Child Development Center on standing terms. To the extent that administrative, programmatic, or correspondence records of the Center remain in the Board’s holdings — separate from the research data deposited at Yale — they should be made available to qualified researchers and to subjects under standard archival terms. This change is fully within the Board’s control.
4. Acknowledge, plainly, what was done. The strongest response to a wrong inherited from earlier institutional life is not to perform reluctance about discussing it. The Board has the standing — and arguably the obligation — to say in public that the design of the twin study was wrong, that the adoptive families and the children were owed information they did not receive, and that the work of repair is the Board’s as much as anyone’s.

Direct contact for interested parties

Members of the public who wish to write to the Jewish Board about the records, the study, or the Board’s public position can use the channels below. Note: if you are an adoptee from a former Louise Wise placement seeking information about your own adoption history, the practical first stop is Spence-Chapin, which holds the adoption files. The Jewish Board does not.

Contact details are taken from the Jewish Board’s public-facing website. If they have changed since this page was written, the Board’s current contact page at jewishboard.org/contact-us is authoritative.