Reply To: Where to start becoming Jewish when family roots discovered

Thank you Mammele, your perspective helps me keep the task of establishing my roots in perspective (sorry for the redundant vocabulary, I just finally finished skimming all the old threads in Decaffinated Coffee at almost 3 am, and my brain is glazing over with my eyes!).

Reading the conversos story of Doreen Carvajal in her brand new book The Forgetting River, I was struck by how her Sephardic Jewish ancestors fought to survive, something I believe my Ashkenazi (I think that’s the right word?) family did too.

Like those conversos, it would seem that my relatives assimilated as part of that survival process.

When I have wondered in the past, how could they have affiliated with a new religion, a thought that initially frustrated and disappointed me, I have come to keep in mind several things:

They must have thought and known that their lives depended upon it. I can have no idea what that was like first-hand and I am not to judge from my privileged position of comfort and convenience in the year 2012 in the United States of America. And, perhaps (this is the thought that still makes me tear up), they realized that only by staying alive could future generations like me be possible, and thus able to find their way back to what my MomMom called “the one true religion.”

It is now a call within me to ensure that this precious and hard-fought-for family heritage is not snuffed out. I feel like a spark finding it’s way back to it’s original source of light. I feel like something is guiding me.

It is funny how deep thoughts come to one in the middle of the night sometimes.

You and each new person here are like lamps on the path back to where I belong. You illuminate the next step for me, and for that I am profoundly grateful. Thank you.