Sarah Cecilie Finkelstein

As one of the original ‘Milk Carton Kids’ who was the subject of a nationwide search as a child, Sarah experienced an international child abduction from Norway to the USA, where she was hidden within the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Chassidic community for 14 years.

Soon after arriving in New York City Sarah was converted to Judaism, her name was changed, and she was led to become deeply alienated from the mother and Norwegian family she had so dearly loved. “I never had a mother!” she insisted to her little friends at age 5, so complete was her indoctrination against her mother.

Sarah found herself on a milk carton when she was 13, and this was a turning point in her life. Although she always knew she had been taken from her mother, she never thought of it as an “abduction” until seeing her picture on the back of that milk carton. It dawned on her that what her father had done was serious enough to warrant a national search, and planted seeds of doubt in her about her father’s justification for what he had done.

It was only the start of a long journey to find her place in her family and in the world as she rejected her father and the Orthodox Jewish life in which she’d been raised, got to meet her mother for the first time in 12 years, and struggled to make sense of all that had occurred. Were her father’s actions justified in any way? This was a question that haunted Sarah for years.

Sarah’s father Herbert’s deep mistrust and restlessness led to many dramatic situations and events when Sarah was a child, including having to beg for money and shelter, traveling through 34 of the 50 US States to evade capture by the police, and switching identities many times. Sarah had to pretend to be a boy for a while when she was very young.

Sarah’s story has been featured on media in the USA and Europe such as CNN, Aftenposten, The Guardian, The New York Times, and more.

A 39-minute documentary film about Sarah’s family called “Sarah Cecilie” premiered in London in 2013, introduced in a conference room at the British parliament in London by former Prime Minister Theresa May. Sarah has been featured and mentioned in several books, academic articles, and online. Her focus is on highlighting the plight of children caught in custodial conflict, especially those involved in parental child abduction, and she is very interested in how trauma is treated in the mental health field.

Sarah is an accidental activist. As a college student in New York City, she took a class in community organizing for which she needed to do an internship,and when she chose to work for Child Find of America, it turned out that Child Find was the organization that had placed her on the milk carton years before. There, Sarah spearheaded a project that studied the long-term outcomes of parental abduction, and what she found was that children and parents who had experienced parental child abduction needed more support and understanding. They didn’t quite fit into the category of adopted children who were reunited with their birth parents, and didn’t quite fit in with the issues that children of less dramatic divorces faced. She was asked to write a newsletter for these families, and her support network, “The Kids Link,” was born. Shortly after the first newsletter went out, she was contacted by CNN and was asked to tell her story on the air. Sarah did not feel worthy or able to tell the story eloquently enough, but she did it, and from there, her activism took off.

Sarah has in recent years reconnected with her ailing father, and her focus on Marshall Rosenberg’s philosophy of Nonviolent Communication is a source of strength for her in her work on healing and forgiveness. She believes that all children need both parents and extended families in their lives to the greatest extent possible, and that only then can a child feel whole as they work to accept the realities of their families’ strengths and weaknesses and build their own healthy and independent lives.

Sarah is married and has two sons, Aidan and Daniel, ages 13 and 9. She is a U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Norway and has a master's degree in social policy from the Oslo University College. The family lives in a small town on Long Island with their two cats, Cubbie and Lexi.