LOS ANGELES (AP) — If "The story of Jack and Oskar" was pitched as the script for a Hollywood movie, it's a good bet no one would believe it. 
 
 In this Nov. 25, 1979 photo, Jack Yufe, left, and his twin brother, Oskar, look on. Separated soon after birth, Jack Yufe was raised as a Jew in Trinidad while his sibling Oskar grew up in Nazi Germany... (Associated Press) 
 
 Separated sixth months after birth in 1933, Jack Yufe was raised as a Jew in his native Trinidad while his identical twin, Oskar Stohr, grew up in Nazi Germany, where he joined the Hitler Youth movement. 
 
 When the two met again at a German train station at age 21 they discovered they didn't particularly like each other. Not so much because they were different, but because they were so much alike. 
 
 Yufe, who died Monday of cancer in a San Diego hospital, had arrived for that first meeting wearing a white sports jacket, shirt and wire-rimmed glasses. So had his brother. 
 
 "I said, 'Oskar, you are wearing the same shirt and same glasses. Why?'" Yufe, who was 82, recalled in a 1999 BBC documentary. "He said to me, 'Why are you wearing the same thing that I am?'" 
 
 As they got to know each other better they would learn they also walked with the same gait, had the same nervous habits, even liked to play the same practical jokes on people. 
 
 "They both used to wash their hands before and after going to the toilet," recalled Nancy L. Segal, a professor of psychology at California State University, Fullerton, who studied the brothers as part of a landmark study of twins conducted at the University of Minnesota. 
 
 "They both used to like to sneeze loudly in elevators, thinking that was funny," she continued. "If you sat across from them at a table and there was a vase with a rose or something, they would both shove it aside because they couldn't stand that." 
 
 They also shared the same hot temper and competitive drive, which led them to learn not to ever talk politics or religion, Yufe's son, Kenneth, said Wednesday. 
 
 "It was an interesting pair to watch, for sure," he added. 
 
 The two were separated when their parents split and their mother took Oskar to her native Germany while Jack stayed in Trinidad with their father. In his teens, Yufe moved to Israel where he served in the navy before moving to the United States and going into the retail business in San Diego. 
 
 "When he first started he was selling out of a van, and he'd see people who had no shoes or horrible shoes and he'd say, "Here's a pair of boots, give me a dollar a week, that sort of thing," the son recalled. "He'd give credit to people who never had credit before." 
 
 But if the buyer didn't pay that dollar a week, his son recalled with a laugh, he'd demand those boots back. 
 
 "He was very old school, but he really was a wonderful guy." 
 
 It was in San Diego that Yufe's first wife learned of the landmark Minnesota Twins Study and persuaded her husband and brother-in-law to take part. They and others showed remarkable similarities despite growing up apart from one another for decades. 
 
 "As psychologists, it made us really rethink our explanations for behavior," said Segal. 
 
 Yufe and Stohr, meanwhile, came to care deeply for one another, said the psychologist, who got to know both over the 20-year study and wrote about them in her books "Born Together — Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study" and "Indivisible by Two: Lives of Extraordinary Twins." 
 
 When Stohr died of cancer in 1997, she said, Yufe was devastated but couldn't bring himself to attend the funeral because he looked so much like his brother that he feared it would disturb the family. 
 
 "They had an amazing, what I would call a love-hate relationship," she said. "They were fascinated by one another, fascinated by their similarities, intrigued that the worst traits that they saw in themselves were mirrored in the other one. They were hot tempered and short tempered and impatient, demanding. But their families loved them." 
 
 In addition to his wife, Ruth, and son, Kenneth, Yufe is survived by daughters Anita Yufe, Hovi Reader and Debvra Gregory and stepsons Renee and Enrique Vega. ||||| Although the brothers got to know one another much better through the study and subsequent visits, their relationship never lost its prickly edge. Oskar had the same competitive nature, and the rivalry between them "was just nonstop," Kenneth Yufe said Tuesday, recalling the time the two men even battled to see who had the best technique for cleaning a dirty car window. ||||| 
 
 Separated soon after birth, Jack Yufe, left, was raised as a Jew in Trinidad while his sibling Oskar Stohr, right, grew up in Nazi Germany where he joined the Hitler Youth. (Robert Lachman/Los Angeles Times via AP) 
 
 Jack Yufe grew up missing his other half, an identical twin brother from whom he had been separated at six months. 
 
 For years, they exchanged letters and photographs. Then, at age 21, they met at a German train station. The encounter was detailed in psychologist Nancy Segal’s book “Indivisible by Two: Lives of Extraordinary Twins.” 
 
 Yufe and his brother, Oskar Stohr, examined one another as if they were looking at alien specimens, though no likeness could have been more familiar to either of them. Their cultural differences were as immediately apparent as their physical similarities. Casting a wary eye at Yufe’s Israeli luggage tags, Stohr removed them and told his long-lost brother to tell others he was coming from America. 
 
 From this first uneasy exchange in 1954 grew a complex but enduring bond that would bring Yufe and Stohr to the center of discussions about nature and nurture. After all, the differences between the brothers’ upbringings were more extreme than those experienced by most twins separated by circumstance. 
 
 Yufe grew up Jewish in Trinidad and became an officer in the Israeli Navy. Stohr grew up Catholic in Nazi Germany and became an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth. 
 
 Yufe died Monday of cancer in a San Diego hospital, the Associated Press reports. He was 82. 
 
 Stohr passed away in 1997, also of cancer. 
 
 The brothers’ unique relationship was a source of fascination for the researchers behind the landmark Minnesota twin study conducted from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. Seeking to identify how environmental and genetic factors contributed to psychological traits, the study closely examined the behaviors of sets of twins who were separated early in their lives and raised by different families. 
 
 What made Yufe and Stohr an extraordinary case was not only the stark contrasts between the cultures in which they grew up — Nazism versus Judaism — but also the striking similarities in their habits and emotional temperaments. 
 
 In 1933, Yufe and Stohr were born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, to a Romanian Jewish father and a German Catholic mother. According to Segal, it’s not known whether the couple was ever married, and their relationship quickly soured “as a result of [the father’s] ‘roving eyes’ and excessive drinking.” 
 
 The twins’ mother returned to her native Germany with Stohr and an older daughter in tow, while Yufe remained in Trinidad as a British subject. Meanwhile, Stohr became a subject of the German Reich and a member of the Hitler Youth, a cause he took on with enthusiasm. 
 
 The Los Angeles Times reports that Stohr confessed years later to having dreamt of shooting his twin in an aerial dogfight. On the other hand, Yufe had a nightmare about killing his brother with a bayonet. 
 
 Their stark cultural, political and religious differences were what initially made them the stars of headlines such as “Twins: Nazi and Jew” and snapshots that featured the Jewish star printed above one brother and a swastika above the other. 
 
 “But that’s too simple,” Segal wrote of the pair. “That’s not how it was.” 
 
 Once Yufe and Stohr started discovering their shared idiosyncrasies, those seemed even more peculiar than what set them apart. 
 
 The first meeting — when Yufe visited Stohr, his mother and her side of the family in Germany — was awkward. Yufe recalled to Segal, “We saw each other as enemies, neither one of us would change. We looked at each other with suspicion.” Then, on a boat trip they took together on the Rhine River, Jack had hoped to have some private time with Stohr, “but he was so unfriendly, and he was not trying to hide it. He kept covering his eyes with his hand.” 
 
 After six days, they parted ways with just a cold handshake. They wouldn’t see each other for another 25 years. 
 
 It was the Minnesota twin study that ultimately brought them back together. Yufe told the Los Angeles Times in 1979, “I thought it perhaps would be a good idea…to meet in a neutral territory to hash out all this, all the hidden feelings.” 
 
 The revelations began when they met at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. As it so happens, both were wearing the same outfit: a white sports jacket, shirt and wire-rimmed glasses. 
 
 “I said, ‘Oskar, you are wearing the same shirt and same glasses. Why?'” Yufe recalled in a 1999 BBC documentary. “He said to me, ‘Why are you wearing the same thing that I am?'” 
 
 The similarities soon piled on, with startling specificity: both read books from back to front, sneezed loudly in elevators, wrapped rubber bands around their wrists, flushed toilets before and after using them and wore tight bathing suits. 
 
 Segal explains in “Indivisible by Two” that some of these peculiar commonalities could be explained by genetics. The toilet-flushing, for instance, likely had to do with the brothers’ sensitivity to germs. 
 
 In later years, their wives noticed that they walked, and even tripped, in a similar fashion. 
 
 Still, some differences persisted. They could never agree on Israel and Palestine, for instance, or who was responsible for World War II. Segal writes, “Oskar’s repeated reference to German soldiers as ‘we’ infuriated Jack.” 
 
 After a stint in the Israeli army, Yufe eventually settled in San Diego and became the owner of a retail store called “El Progresso.” Stohr stayed in Germany, working as a miner and electrical welder. 
 
 “They had an amazing, what I would call a love-hate relationship,” Yufe’s wife, Ruth, told the AP. “They were fascinated by one another, fascinated by their similarities, intrigued that the worst traits that they saw in themselves were mirrored in the other one. They were hot-tempered and short-tempered and impatient, demanding. But their families loved them.” 
 
 Yufe’s son, Kenneth, described his father to the AP as “very old school,” but a “wonderful guy.” 
 
 Yufe is also survived by daughters Anita Yufe, Hovi Reader and Debvra Gregory, as well as stepsons Renee and Enrique Vega. 
 
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– A California man named Jack Yufe died this week at age 82, and his life story is so fascinating that the AP likens it to a Hollywood script nobody would believe; the Los Angeles Times draws a comparison to a "tabloid headline." The reason? Yufe was born in Trinidad along with an identical twin brother, but their parents split after 6 months. Yufe grew up as a Jew, even serving a stint in the Israeli navy. Brother Oskar Stohr, meanwhile, went to Germany with his Catholic mom and grew up as a Nazi, becoming a member of the Hitler Youth. They managed to stay in touch and met again at age 21. The weird part? Despite their incredibly different backgrounds, they were alike in nearly every way. They dressed the same (both showed up to their first meeting in a white sports jacket and wire-rimmed glasses), walked the same, wore the same mustache, and had the same temperament and quirks. They both liked to sneeze loudly to scare people as a joke, and "both used to wash their hands before and after going to the toilet," says Nancy Segal, a professor of psychology who studied the pair as part of a well-known study of separated twins at the University of Minnesota. The brothers' story eventually rose to "the center of discussions about nature and nurture," notes the Washington Post. Though the brothers didn't much like each other at first, that changed over the years. When Stohr died of cancer in 1997, a devastated Yufe didn't attend the funeral, however, notes AP. They looked so much alike he was afraid it would upset loved ones. (A survivor of the Nazi death camps' only mass escape also recently died.)