Unless a person works on himself to internalize and truly live Yiddishkeit, what does the fact that his parents were religious say about him?

As told to C. Saphir

“It’s not possible for baalei teshuvah to fully integrate into the frum community,” the woman beside me remarked confidently.

“Of course it is,” I replied.

“No, it’s not,” she insisted. “I can always tell a baal teshuvah from a mile away.”

“Really?” I asked, my curiosity piqued. “How can you tell?”

“Oh, in a million ways,” she said, waving her hand. “The way they talk. The way they dress. The way they pronounce Hebrew words. There’s always a giveaway.”

“Interesting,” I murmured.

I kept my glee safely hidden until I came home. “I made it!” I announced, to no one in particular, once I closed my front door. “She thinks I’m an FFB!”

 Ever since I became a baalas teshuvah, some 40 years ago, I’ve told people who asked about my background that I grew up “traditional.” I don’t tell them traditional what.

My mother was born in prewar Berlin to assimilated Jewish parents. Her father was born to an Orthodox family, the youngest of 14 children, but he defected and joined the Reform movement, putting himself through Heidelberg University and graduating as an electrical engineer. When the Nazis rose to power, he fled, escaping to safer shores with his wife and daughter — my grandmother and mother — before the start of the war. All his siblings perished at the hands of the Nazis.

My grandfather actually blamed the Orthodox for causing the Holocaust — through their refusal to assimilate. After the war, when a local rabbi knocked on his door and tried to convince him to send his daughter to a Jewish school, his response was to put her in a convent — where, ironically, she was reviled because she was a German.

After several years in the convent, my mother went to college, where she met my father, who came from a completely secular family. At my grandfather’s behest, their wedding was held in a church, and a photo taken during the occasion shows my mother’s father beaming with delight at having achieved his life’s goal of total assimilation.

My sister, my brother, and I were raised as Christians, attending church every Sunday and celebrating Xmas and other Christian holidays, much to my grandfather’s satisfaction.

Oddly, each time we visited my grandfather, he would point to me and tell my mother, “You’re going to have trouble from this one. She has a Jewish heart.”