Children of BTs navigate life as the first generation of FFBs

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hen someone leaves her secular life to live a life of Torah and mitzvos, we applaud her courage, her commitment to truth, and her strength of character to make this momentous change.

Being a baalas teshuvah (or giyores) is like being a new immigrant — which makes the children of baalei teshuvah the first-generation natives in frum society. What is life like for them, growing up knowing only an observant life?

A hyperfocus on background can be detrimental to healthy integration. But the reality is that there are certain experiences and challenges unique to children who grow up with parents who are baalei teshuvah — even as every family is unique, and children within each family will have their own perspectives on their upbringing, and their own emotional reactions to their background.

How Do the Kids Feel?

When parents have an interesting background story, children will live with that story and often develop their own relationship to it. Some children embrace that aspect of their family history, while others just want to be “regular” and will do their best to downplay it.

Gila Reidy’s parents met in Venice, where her father — an Italian glass blower at the top of his field who converted to Judaism in his thirties — had a store in the Jewish ghetto. The store was a popular tourist stop, and her mother, on her own journey to observance at the time, walked into the store one day. The rest is history.

“I was never going to fly under the radar,” says Gila, a mom of two who was raised in Baltimore and still lives there. “I heard their story growing up and was proud of my parents and family. And because of their interesting background, I was more of a free spirit.”

“It was just there,” says Meira Schneider-Atik, who lives in Queens, New York with her husband and three children. Her father was raised in a traditional home, but while teaching in a public school in upper Manhattan, he became friends with some fellow teachers who were Orthodox and helped him on his journey to become observant. “It was part of my life’s framework. My father was never ashamed or embarrassed of his status as a baal teshuvah, and I grew up with that attitude. He would talk about it. He also set a terrific example because he appreciated Torah and mitzvos very much and passed that on to me and my sister.”

Most of the interviewees I spoke with were tremendously proud of their parents’ journey, but acknowledged that growing up in its shadow wasn’t without its difficulties.

“As a child, it was definitely a little challenging because there were holes in my Yiddishkeit that my parents didn’t necessarily have the tools to fill, through no fault of their own,” says Avi Rosalimsky, today a rebbi at Yeshivat Noam in Paramus, New Jersey. “Don’t get me wrong. My parents are amazing people and I learned and continue to learn a tremendous amount from them. But there were just some aspects of Judaism they weren’t familiar with because they didn’t grow up with it.”

Shani Kramer, who grew up in Cincinnati and Cleveland, Ohio, reflects that it took her a while to appreciate having parents who are baalei teshuvah. “When you grow up, you definitely feel like something’s different. I was different, my family was different. I didn’t have any religious cousins. I wasn’t the only one like that, but I did feel like I was a little different in that way.”

For others, it was so much in the background that it wasn’t even on their radar growing up. When I asked my friend Shani Newman how she felt, she responded, “I don’t know what I have to say because when we were growing up, aside from not having frum cousins, I didn’t feel so different.” Her parents became frum prior to getting married. They met in high school and decided together to live a frum life, becoming an integral part of the Cleveland community, where they raised their four children, all of whom still live in Cleveland.