Miss Puerto Rico, at Yad Vashem, Reveals Great-Grandfather Was Holocaust Survivor

The Miss Universe contestant from Puerto Rico surprised her fellow contestants and the staff of Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust museum when she revealed that her great-grandfather was a Holocaust survivor. Miss Puerto Rico Michelle Colon was captured on video making the announcement on a visit to Yad Vashem late last week. The video was tweeted over the weekend by Dani Dayan, Yad Vashem chairman and former Consul General of Israel in New York. The Miss Universe pageant will be held on Sunday in Eilat in southern Israel; the contestants have been in Israel since late last month. “I came here to Israel, knowing I would be more connected to my family, because my great-grandfather actually escaped from the Holocaust. All his family members, his sisters, his brothers, even their daughters, were killed in the concentration camps,” Colon said of her great-grandfather Rodolfo Cohn, who moved to the Caribbean after the Holocaust and met his wife Dorila Thomas, who Colon described as “a descendant of slaves.”