Converts’ Hardships Expose Truth
By Laura Birnbaum
“My father didn’t survive the Holocaust to have his grandson marry a shiksa.”
Alison, my classmate from the University of Pennsylvania who is currently in the process of converting to Judaism, gasped at the harshness of the words delivered stoically by her boyfriend’s mother.
He succumbed to intense pressure from his parents to end the relationship, while she was subjected to a cascade of accusations:
“Converts are not welcome in my family.” “No Jewish boy will ever want to marry you.” “You are inadequate to raise Jewish children.”
“I felt like someone was putting a knife through my heart,” she told me. “When you’re so passionate about something, and you know you will never be accepted…. I’ll always feel inadequate.”
As I had recently discovered, Alison’s case was not an isolated incident in Penn’s Jewish community…. (Full Article)
* (Note in the margin: While organized Jewry has worked to multiculturalize European derived peoples the world over, they have laws in place to prevent multiculturalization of their own people. This recent article from the Israeli press states that there are – “300,000 Israelis who cannot marry because one of the partners is not Jewish”).
