How I Became Jewish

Ellen Kolba

I’m in 4^th grade, in Chicago, walking home with a new friend, Rena.

“I won’t be in school tomorrow,” Rena informs me, looking solemn. “It’s a Jewish holiday.”

“What’s that?” I ask her. She’s shocked into silent disbelief.

I tell my mother about this puzzling incident. “What’s a Jewish holiday?” Still no answer, but shortly afterward, my parents and a group of their Progressive Party/labor union friends establish the North Shore School of Jewish Studies.

My mother writes a key text—Biblical stories re-cast as folk tales. We sing “Que Bonita Bandera” and “Zhankoya” (Aunt Natasha drives the tractor/Grandma runs the cream extractor). Every week we bring money for the brand-new state of Israel. But I still don’t have an answer to my question: What’s a Jewish holiday?

In April of 1950 the school rents a banquet room in a hotel and has a seder. I learn to say the blessing and light the candles. This is an exciting moment, kind of like having the lead in a play. In fact, the words stay in my memory for decades, along with the words to “Adir Hu,” which I have also learned for the occasion. I recover these buried memories more than three decades later at Bnai Keshet and am shocked. All along, I’ve thought that these were words that had no meaning for anyone else.

Marshall and I marry, have two sons, and move to New Jersey. I resist my mother-in-law’s pressure to join a congregation and have bar mitzvahs for the boys. Even when my friend Joan, a member of the Union of Radical Political Economists and a friend of Abbie Hoffman’s, asks if I’m interested in checking out the new congregation in town, I resist. How could I possibly insist when our reluctant boys show no interest, as I’m sure they will?

Then one Sunday, when our older son, Boris, is approaching the age of 12, he visits Bnai Keshet with his friend Michael, who is preparing for his bar mitzvah. Boris comes home very excited and very insistent on our acting immediately: “It’s a synagogue; you have to go see the rabbi right away and sign me up. I want a bar mitzvah.”

Stunned, I tell Marshall that this job is his. I will drive the kids to Hebrew School (because of course Nick now wants to have a bar mitzvah), but he will have to deal with the rabbi. He comes home from that first meeting also stunned, but for a different reason. The rabbis of his childhood were scary, punitive old men whom he could barely understand. This rabbi was a very young woman (not yet 30, in fact) and not at all scary: Joy Levitt. Marshall signs up both Boris and Nick.

I join the carpool but stay out of the building—until a couple of weeks before the big day, when we have to meet with the rabbi to talk about the roles we will play. I feel my panic growing. I have to choose a Hebrew name. And I have to learn to say a blessing in Hebrew. This is worse than telling my mother that her grandson will be a bar mitzvah.

Somehow, I survive, and when I finally relax, I realize that what’s left—the residue of the big day—is a growing curiosity about this still-foreign tradition. I want to learn more. And I do.

Now flash forward ten years. I am at a conference in Louisville, Kentucky, when Marshall calls, sounding delighted but puzzled. He’s been cleaning up a pile of audiotapes and has found something he can’t identify but somehow sounds familiar.

“Hold on. I’ll play it for you.”

And through the phone comes a sound that I recognize instantly. It’s Boris practicing the prayer after his Haf Torah.

“Are you sure?” asks Marshall.

“Absolutely. I could probably chant it myself.”

AND HOPE TO SEE YOU SUNDAY!