Actor David Duchovny reading about his Jewish ancestors on “Finding Your Roots.” Photo: Screenshot

Actor David Duchovny made discoveries about his Jewish family members from Eastern Europe and their journey to immigrate to the United States in Tuesday’s episode of the PBS show Finding Your Roots.

Duchovny, who recently starred as a Jewish father in the Netflix film You People, started off by learning that his paternal grandfather, Moshe Duchovny, was born in Berdychiv, which is in now in northern Ukraine. The actor, whose mother is Protestant, got emotional reading his grandfather’s petition for American citizenship filed in 1940.

“It just makes me so sad that I didn’t get to meet him really,” he told Finding Your Roots host Henry Louis Gates Jr. “We missed one another on this plane of existence, right? But here he is coming back.”

Moshe Duchovny died in New York in 1960 at the age of 58 when David was an infant. He was an accomplished Yiddish writer who was also a reporter for a local Yiddish language paper and published several novels. David learned all this from reading an obituary about his grandfather that was presented by Gates Jr.

“You realize that these people who are figures to you had full lives,” said the X-Files star, 62, after reading about his grandfather’s life. “Just to think of him, I mean I knew he was just a reporter of some kind, but I don’t know how vibrant he was and how busy.”

David also discovered that his father’s family in Russia ran a dairy farm and lived in an area where the Jewish community faced antisemitic violence and restrictions. When they were granted permission to leave Russia, they traveled in 1910 to Jaffa, which was then part of Palestine, where they ran an inn.

Their stay in the city was short though when in December 1914, the local Ottoman government violently deported 6,000 Jews, including the Duchovnys, and sent them on a boat to Egypt. The expelled Jews were also robbed of most of their possessions and arrived in Egypt with nothing. David got emotional once again after reading a newspaper article about the devastating fate that befell his great-grandparents and their family.

Two years after arriving in Egypt, David’s great-grandfather and grandfather boarded a ship bound for the United States. The rest of the family arrived in New York in 1920. David said he was “proud” to learn about his family’s perseverance throughout all their hardships.

“I can’t imagine their state of mind,” he said. “You’re always thinking of the hope of the new world and they must have had some hope, but [also] the fear and the dislocation. They’ve been moving quite a bit for a couple of years and it’s not going well. And they’re going all over the world looking for a home … They ran, and they ran and they got somewhere. They didn’t give up.”

David’s great-grandmother died of tuberculosis only six weeks after arriving in New York. Her tombstone remains at a Jewish cemetery in Queens, NY, and includes a portrait of her. David saw an image of the tombstone, with its photo and Hebrew inscription, and was able for the first time ever to see what his great-grandmother looked like.

The actor’s grand-grandfather moved back to Israel shortly after becoming a widower and lived in Tel Aviv until he died on Dec. 5, 1942 at the age of 68. He remains buried at Nahalat Yitzhak Cemetery in Tel Aviv.

“I always just thought that it was luck — that they got out before the Holocaust,” he said. “But now I think it’s more, they were smart. They were looking for opportunity and safety,” David said. He added, “My life has been so easy compared to them. I didn’t fear for my life. I didn’t think we’d be forced to move. I had a solid childhood. I’m just lucky in that way and the question becomes — what do you owe? What’s your responsibility?

“I have a sense of place that I didn’t have before. I feel a presence of all these people in the room right now.”

Tuesday’s episode of Finding Your Roots additionally featured Big Mouth actor Richard Kind, who also made discoveries about his Jewish family tracing back to Eastern Europe.