On being Jewish, or not

The house in which I spent most of my growing up years was on the street that divided the older section of the small town - which was absorbed into the suburbs of Philadelphia by the time I was a teenager - from the newer one. Our house was brand-new, built in 1956, but it was on the old side of the street, the Catholic side. By 1960, the empty lots across the street were built up, and the new neighborhood was a Jewish one. Our new neighbors had migrated from Jewish sections of the city that were becoming black.

I was very glad, because the new kids all went to the public school that I attended instead of the Catholic school that the kids on my side of the street went to.

But almost immediately I realized that their friendships were already made. Most of new kids attended the same temple, which was in the city, and those that didn't went to the new synagogue in our neighborhood. They went to Hebrew school after school. The girls belonged to a Jewish sorority.

I came from a non-practicing only vaguely Jewish family. My parents fled Vienna because of Hitler but we didn't even go to temple on the high holidays. The only thing we did was drive to New York on the first night of Passover for a seder at the home of a great-uncle, but he died when I was still in elementary school.

Plus, some of these kids made it clear to me early on that though my father was Jewish and my mother was much more interested in Judaism than the Catholic church that her family had dropped out of generations before, I was not a Jew. Judaism is passed on through the mother's line.

So I didn't fit in anywhere. To add to the problems this caused, I was slightly hard-of-hearing, my parents spoke with accents, and my mother made my sandwiches on rye bread. Even the Jewish mothers in my neighborhood knew better than that.

Fortunately for me my parents sent me to the country in the summer, where I stayed with Quaker friends-of-the-family who lived in an intentional community. The Quaker families were active in the civil rights and then the peace movement, and I was very comfortable there, but I was never really a Quaker.

During the school year, I was friends with the kids in my classes. By the time I was in high school about 90% of my classmates in the honors program were Jewish, and we'd grown up enough for our minor differences not to matter. When I went to college, I was more comfortable with a Jewish crowd. By the time I was 21, I was living with a guy whose family was orthodox. (Notice, I said "whose family was" - Gary was in his rebellious stage at the time.) In retrospect, I think what I enjoyed -still enjoy - most about my Jewish friends has more to do with humor than anything else.

And, as an adult, because my parents were refugees and because I spent those formative high school and college years hanging out with a Jewish crowd, I've always felt more Jewish than not.

Imagine my surprise when a relatively new friend of mine who happens to be the wife of the reform rabbi here in San Luis told me - just yesterday - that the reform movement has always accepted patrilineal descent.

So after nearly 56 years of not quite being Jewish, I guess I am Jewish after all. Mazel tov. What good luck.

Eve