For her and my father, who had grown up in an anti-Semitic communist environment, my leanings toward frumkeit were a dangerous return to the shtetl

M y father was only 12 years old in 1944 when the letter his mother had sent from Bucharest to his grandmother in Transylvania was returned to them with the words “Addressee Unknown.” When my father’s mother saw the envelope she immediately knew what had happened. At that point she declared that they were done with Yiddishkeit. There was no more kosher food no more Shabbos candles no more Pesach Sedorim.

My mother who was born in 1939 does not remember life before the war nor does she remember the family’s deportation by the Nazis. She does however remember the retreat of the Nazis from Stalingrad during which they went “Jew hunting.” She was four years old at the time and suffering from whooping cough and she still remembers hiding with her parents and grandparents in a basement and hearing the sounds of the Nazis’ boots above her head while her mother held her mouth shut.

After the war my parents worked tirelessly to become successful professionals a doctor and a lawyer respectively. As Jews living under a communist regime they had to work twice as hard as their non-Jewish neighbors all the while hoping that their applications to leave Romania for Israel would be approved. After an almost 20-year wait they made their way to Israel in 1970. In search of better professional opportunities they moved to the US in 1974 where they raised me in the liberal environment of Worcester Massachusetts.

Although my parents were not observant their Jewish identity was very important to them so they sent me to a Jewish day school.

For some inexplicable reason I found myself drawn to Yiddishkeit from a young age. I remember seeing a group of chassidish kids in a science museum once and trying to infiltrate their group because I felt a magnetic pull toward them. When I was ten I tried to kasher my mother’s kitchen when she wasn’t home. The experiment was a disaster and my mother returned home to a huge mess.

During my first year in Wellesley College I got involved in the Harvard Hillel and the Boston Chabad and I started wearing long skirts and keeping Shabbos. I also chose a major in Jewish studies.

“Rebecca we’re not sending you to college so that you can become religious!” my mother lamented. For her and my father who had grown up in an anti-Semitic communist environment my leanings toward frumkeit were a dangerous return to the shtetl. Much as they valued their Jewish identity they were terrified that I their only child was embracing a primitive lifestyle and setting myself up for misery and deprivation.

After much tense discussion I decided to give up on my dream of a religious future rather than disappoint my parents. “What if I spend my junior year of college in Tel Aviv University?” I suggested to them as a compromise. My parents had a different suggestion though. “You can always go to Israel later” they said. “Why don’t you spend your junior year in Europe?”

Seeing how uncomfortable they were with the Israel idea, I agreed to spend a year in Europe, and enrolled in a study-abroad program in southern France that attracted many foreign students. Once there, my rebellious streak — which had previously expressed itself in my interest in Judaism — flared in a different direction. Many of the students in the college town of Aix-en-Provence were from Germany, and as a child of Holocaust survivors, I was terrified of Germans. Determined to show I wasn’t scared, I attended a Friday night party with a bunch of German guys, wearing a big Magen David around my neck.

It was a low-budget party, so participants were expected to bring their own meat to grill. Of all the guys at the party, there was only one who didn’t bring pork. His name was Karl, and he offered me some of his turkey. Unwilling to touch pork, I agreed to share Karl’s meat.

From there, a friendship developed between us, and we started to date. In my mind, our relationship was nothing serious — until one day, to my surprise, Karl invited me to meet his parents, who were visiting from Germany.

I had never before met any Germans who were alive during World War II, and meeting Karl’s parents made my blood run cold. When they asked me about my family, I said, “I don’t have much family, because most of my relatives were killed by the Nazis in Auschwitz.” That was a great conversation stopper.

Shortly after I started dating Karl, while I was out somewhere with my British friend Lucy, I met a kippah-wearing Israeli medical student who was studying in the same town in France. “This is who I should be dating,” I thought to myself.

Lucy thought differently. “Rebecca already has a boyfriend,” she told the medical student. “She’s not interested in talking to you.”

I felt an aching emptiness after that. But I had already promised Karl that he could visit me at home that summer, and I wasn’t one to break a commitment.

At the end of our year in Europe, I returned home to Worcester and Karl went back to Germany, but we kept up a long-distance relationship by mail and telephone. My parents had serious misgivings about my dating a non-Jew, especially a German, but when Karl flew to the US to visit me, they were very gracious to him.

The following winter, I traveled to Germany to visit Karl. Walking the streets of Karlsruhe and Stuttgart, I shivered, and not just because of the cold. Each time I saw an older person, I wondered what they had been up to during the war years.

I was very open with Karl about my feelings toward Germans, and he agreed with me that there was something about the German character that allowed the Holocaust to happen. He himself didn’t like Germany, nor was he fond of Catholicism, his family’s religion. “I was an altar boy for years,” he told me, “and I hated every minute of it.” Having long ceased to attend church services, he considered himself egalitarian and atheistic, and he had no problem with my Jewishness.

It was with some measure of dread that I made the decision to marry Karl. I had always promised myself that I would be frum when I grew up, but now that I was intermarrying, I had to close the chapter on that dream, knowing it could never come to fruition.

When I informed my parents that I was planning to marry Karl, my father’s reaction was, “He’s a good guy; the main thing is that you should be happy.” My mother comforted herself with the knowledge that her mother had grown up under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and had some cultural similarities to Karl.

I had finished college and Karl hadn’t, so we decided to get married in Germany and live there until he graduated. When my mother-in-law mentioned something about a church wedding, I informed her that I absolutely would not hear of it. “Why not?” she wondered.

“Because I’m Jewish,” I explained.

She didn’t understand, but we had a town-hall wedding nonetheless.

I felt terribly out of place in Germany, and hated living there. One day, Karl came home and found me crying. “What’s wrong?” he asked in concern.

“I just don’t like it here,” I sniffled. “And tomorrow is Yom Kippur.”

Karl had never heard of Yom Kippur. “Let’s go out for dinner,” he suggested. He took me to an eatery where the specialty was pizza topped with sour cream and bacon. On Erev Yom Kippur. I just sat there and cried.

By the time we moved back to the US, Karl and I had agreed that religion would not be part of our life. “Religion is so divisive,” I said. “Who needs it?”

Karl agreed. “The main thing is that we should be good people,” he declared.

When our daughter Natalie was born, we did not give her a Jewish name. Shortly afterward, a Conservative rabbi and his wife moved in across the street from us. “We have a Tot Shabbat program at the synagogue,” the rabbi’s wife told me. “Why don’t you bring Natalie?”

I started taking Natalie to the program, and in that way I developed a bit of a connection with the synagogue. When I found out that I was expecting again, I decided, inexplicably, that I wanted to light Shabbos candles.

Karl, like a good German, was vehemently opposed to circumcision. So after our son Aaron was born, in 2004, I contacted a local Reform rabbi, and he performed a circumcision-free “brit shalom.” Apparently, however, Heaven had other plans. Aaron had a problem with excretion, and when I took him to a pediatric urologist, I was told that he required circumcision to fix the problem. In the end, Aaron was circumcised at the age of two in the operating room of the local children’s hospital. (I understood then why Jews give a bris at the age of eight days.) As it happened, both the surgeon and the assistant surgeon were Jewish; the assistant was actually religious. Once we were having our son circumcised anyway, I arranged for the procedure to be done in accordance with Jewish law, blessings and all.

The fall before Aaron’s real bris, Karl suffered a sudden, massive seizure. Imaging tests showed that he had a tangled mess of blood vessels in his head, called a cavernous angioma, and he required immediate brain surgery. While he was undergoing surgery, I turned my eyes heavenward and said, “G-d, just get me through this. I know I’ve strayed, and I haven’t kept Shabbos or kosher, but please help me anyway!” It was the first time in years that I had prayed.

Hashem answered my prayers, and the surgery was successful. But something in Karl changed after the surgery. He began to ask me questions about my religion, and started reading books about Judaism. Once, when we visited my cousin Ben, who was a baal teshuvah, Karl picked up a book called Growth Through Torah, by Rabbi Zelig Pliskin, and he couldn’t put it down. “This is amazing stuff!” he exclaimed.

Now, in addition to lighting candles, we began having Friday night dinners and attending Shabbos day services at the Conservative synagogue. In 2011, when the kids were ten and seven, respectively, we made a family trip to Germany for my in-laws’ 50th wedding anniversary, which I hadn’t realized entailed a church service. I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to go into a church, and I went along very hesitantly. Since we were family, we were asked to sit at the front. I felt sick, and Karl didn’t fare much better. He certainly made a statement by not walking up and taking communion, as everyone else in his family did.

After the service, I went back to our apartment, threw myself on the bed, and sobbed for almost an hour. For the first time, I was hit by the full gravity of what I had done by intermarrying. And the worst part was that now there was no way to undo it. I had committed myself to Karl, and we had two children together. I felt hopelessly stuck.

When Karl asked me what was bothering me, I told him that this was the first time I had realized that his family was truly Catholic. “I always wanted a traditional Jewish wedding,” I explained sadly. “And I wanted to live an authentic Jewish life. Obviously, that will never happen.”

“Well,” he remarked, “maybe one day you will have a Jewish wedding.”

I had no idea what he meant by that comment, but I was so floored, I couldn’t say a word in response.

After that trip, we began following the laws of Shabbos more carefully and keeping a kosher kitchen. Our neighbor, the Conservative rabbi, encouraged Karl to convert, which he did in March 2012 at the age of 42, after undergoing bris milah. As time went on, however, we both began feeling uncomfortable in the Conservative synagogue. It felt wrong to drive home on Shabbos after services, and as we took on additional mitzvos, we found the Conservative approach more and more self-contradictory. When another convert in the synagogue showed up the Shabbos after his conversion with Jewish stars tattooed all over his arms, Karl and I were horrified.

About a year after Karl’s conversion, Natalie celebrated her bat mitzvah in the synagogue. She was the only girl who did not wear a kippah and tallis to the ceremony; I refused to allow that, and she was completely on board with me. That summer, she decided to use her bat mitzvah money to pay for a family trip to Israel.

By this point, I had several cousins living in Israel who had become baalei teshuvah. I emailed one of them, David, and asked if we could come for Shabbos. He lived in the Old City with his large family, and after spending Shabbos there, my son Aaron, who was ten at the time, asked me, “Mom, can I get a black hat?”

“Why on earth do you need a black hat?” I questioned.

“Because David has one,” he replied.

I didn’t know what to say. After that Shabbos, I saw that he was very restless. “Aaron, what’s eating you?” I asked.

“Mom,” he said, “what David does is real! What they do in the Conservative synagogue isn’t real!”

Out of the mouth of a ten-year-old.

I looked at him and said, quietly, “I know.”

During our visit to Israel, Karl had a long meeting with the mashgiach of David’s yeshivah, a meeting that prompted him to do a great deal of soul-searching.

When we returned home, Aaron asked me to buy him tzitzis. “If you wear tzitzis, you need to say a brachah on them, and wear a kippah,” I responded.

I was expecting him to say, “Nope,” but he said, “Sure!”

He actually started wearing a yarmulke and tzitzis to school — an ultra-liberal, left-leaning school where no one else wore a kippah. At the same time, Natalie, of her own accord, began to wear long skirts and long sleeves to school, standing out like a sore thumb among a sea of tank tops and skinny jeans.

From the time we returned from Israel, none of us had any interest in going back to the Conservative synagogue. Instead, we found a tiny Orthodox shul where the rabbi was very welcoming. The congregation was made up of a minyan of old men, though, and our kids were the only children in the shul. It was there that Karl realized that his Conservative conversion would not count.

We contacted Aish Hatorah through their website, explaining that we were living in a place with no real religious community, and they put us in touch with a rabbi from a larger Jewish community who began learning with us by Skype. “You have to move,” he kept telling us. And eventually we did move, joining a small, but established frum community in New England.

Today, Karl is working on becoming a ger tzedek. The process of Orthodox conversion is actually harder for someone who is married to a Jew, because the beis din scrutinizes the person’s motives much more closely: Are you doing this for Hashem, or are you doing this because of your wife and children? It has been a long and difficult process, but our family is fully observant today and we are committed to seeing the conversion through to the end.

My parents, who were terrified that being frum would mean a life of hardship, are delighted with the journey our family has taken. They love coming to us for Shabbos and seeing how the Jewish identity they fought to preserve has taken root and blossomed in the next generations. During one visit to our house, my father read the book, Anatomy of a Search, by Rabbi Akiva Tatz, and he commented to me that had he read this book 30 years earlier, he would have taken a different course in life.

Had anyone told me, when I was sitting in a Catholic church in Germany six years ago, that one day I would be a tichel-wearing frum mother, I would have laughed at them — and then cried for myself, mourning what I had lost forever by shunning religion and marrying a non-Jew. To my human eyes, my situation seemed hopeless. But to Hashem, who sees into a person’s heart, no situation is hopeless, no child of His too far away to bring back.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 645)