Monday, October 12, 2015

Help! I Think My Mom Lied About Being Jewish

The Seesaw for The Jewish Daily Forward   

I am a Jewish woman who raised her family Jewish, or so I thought. I bar mitzvahed my son and recently sent him on Birthright, after which he became interested in our ancestry and began to do some digging around. He discovered that none of my mom’s ancestors seem to be Jewish. She says we should ignore this and that she, and therefore we, are Jewish, but I nevertheless have started to feel insecure about it. If my mom is lying, and neither my father nor husband are Jewish, are we still Jewish?

Conversion Might Be in Your Future

A friend once contemplated what he’d do if he woke up one morning and discovered he wasn’t Jewish. Because Judaism is central to his life, he believes he would do whatever it takes to become and remain unambiguously Jewish. In his case, that would mean an Orthodox conversion. But a cousin of mine, upon learning of my wife’s own Orthodox conversion, remarked that she’d have to think long and hard about converting if she suddenly learned she wasn’t Jewish.

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