The Appalachian Jew

Month: November 2025

  • My Journey Back to Judaism, the Faith of My Ancestors – Part 2

    My Journey Back to Judaism, the Faith of My Ancestors – Part 2

    Jewish beginnings

    Even though I was raised as a Christian and was immersed in Christianity, ever since I was a small child there was another track running through my life. I felt that I was Jewish and wanted to be part of the Jewish people.

    I didn’t know how I knew this; it was just a knowing. I believed I was someone born with a Jewish soul, although I wouldn’t have used those words when I was a child.  In my child’s mind, I thought I was a Jew who had been born into the wrong family. But as I listened to my mother, I realized she was dropping hints.

    My mother made it clear that she named each of her children for people from the Hebrew Scriptures.  She also spoke of going to Jewish summer camp when she was young. That, of course, leads to the inevitable question of who in a small town in the South would send their daughter to Jewish summer camp in the early 1940s unless they were Jewish?  When I was old enough to go to camp she sent me to a secular camp where a large number of campers were Jewish.

    When I was older, my mother helped manage the book and gift shop at the local Episcopal Church. Her inventory there included this wall hanging, which is now in my home…

    The shop also sold cassette tapes and songbooks from the series “Scripture in Song,” musical settings of the Psalms.

    I now know that my father, too, had Jewish ancestry, but I didn’t pick up on his hints when I was young. He said only that he had Black Dutch ancestry and that his grandmother told him that anyone who researched the family history would be cursed and die a horrible death. The term Black Dutch is often used as a euphemism for Sephardic Jewish ancestry from Spain.

    My father also had a love for Israel that went beyond any I had ever seen among Christians. Tithing ten percent of his income was central to his spirituality, and he found a way to pay a tithe from the profits of his business directly to Israel. An inventor and manufacturer of the chicken deboning machine, he sold that machinery around the world. However, every tenth machine that was manufactured was given to a kibbutz in Israel, and he personally escorted the machines to the kibbutzim.

    After his death, a former colleague told me that my father often spoke to her about being Jewish, but he never told his own children, and he lived his life as a very devout Christian.

    Both of my parents had been in musical theatre (my mother’s dream had been to be on Broadway), and they made many trips to New York to see Broadway shows. This was in the late 1950s and early 1960s. On one occasion, after their return from New York, I overheard my mother tell someone that they had been denied service in a restaurant because they were Jewish. I wondered then how anyone would know they were Jewish and why they had not simply said they weren’t Jewish.  They always denied being Jewish whenever I asked directly about it. I remember once saying I wanted to be Jewish, and my mother’s response was, “Why do you want to be something you’re not?” 

    I wanted to know who I was…

    There weren’t very many Jewish families in my small hometown when I was growing up, but my mother made sure I knew who all of them were, and they seemed to know my family well. I was only in first or second grade when I learned about the Holocaust and about the Jews in my town who had come to the U.S. as refugees.

    When I was in 4th grade, the mother of one of my Jewish classmates called my mother to ask if I could go to the movies with her son. My mom said yes, and that began a friendship that lasted for several years. By 7th and 8th grade, he and I were considered to be boyfriend and girlfriend, and I became close to his entire family. At the time,  I.D. bracelets were popular among boys, and I wore his bracelet which was obviously Jewish, with the Star of David on it and his name in Hebrew. My friends’ mothers would never have allowed them to wear such a bracelet. When he had his Bar Mitzvah in Atlanta, we were the only family in our town that was invited.

    In college my closest friends were Jewish, and people have always assumed I was Jewish. After graduate school, I worked for several years as a civil rights investigator, investigating employment and housing discrimination, and members of the Jewish community with whom I worked just assumed I was Jewish. Here in the South, oddly enough, perfect strangers have walked up to me and asked if I’m Jewish.  (Why?) Yet no one in my family would openly admit having Jewish ancestry.

    I still have many questions about all of this. It has been like trying to put a puzzle together and realizing that there are many missing pieces. Unfortunately, there is no one who can provide answers. No one is still alive who would be able to give me any more insight than what I already have gleaned.

    One thing I did know for sure, however, and that was that I wanted to claim my Jewish ancestry and live a Jewish life.

  • My Journey Back to Judaism, the Faith of My Ancestors – Part 1

    My Journey Back to Judaism, the Faith of My Ancestors – Part 1

    Christian beginnings

    Born into a privileged and prominent family in a small town in North Georgia in the foothills of Appalachia, I was raised a Christian, as were both of my parents.  However, I’ve known for most of my life that I have Jewish ancestry.  It has taken a lifetime , but I have finally been able to put the puzzle pieces together and to fully realize that both of my parents were “hidden” Jews, known only to a few people, and those few did not include their own children.

    All four of my grandparents were nominal Christians, but not one was a regular church goer. My father was born into a large family in what has been described as abject poverty, and to keep him on the straight and narrow, his oldest sister took him to the Methodist church. He grew up faithfully attending that church.  My mother’s parents made sure she and her sisters faithfully attended a Southern Baptist church.

    When my parents married, they joined the local Episcopal Church and became very active there. My siblings and I became what is known as “cradle Episcopalians,” baptized there as babies, confirmed there, and very active in children’s and youth activities as we grew up.

    My earliest memories are of Grace Episcopal Church in Gainesville, Georgia. My family faithfully attended church every Sunday, and both of my parents were very active in the parish. As a youngster I regularly went to Sunday school, sang in the youth choir, and participated in youth activities. When I look back I can see that even as a child, I was already very spiritual. I felt the presence of God with me. I loved to read the Bible, especially the Hebrew Scriptures, and I particularly loved the Psalms and the writings of the Prophets.

    Grace Episcopal Church as it looked during my childhood.

    As a denomination, the Episcopal Church has always been more progressive and more involved in social justice issues than other Protestant denominations. Grace Church had a very active youth group that did a lot of work in the area of social justice when I was in high school. That work had a massive influence on my life, both then and later. And by the time I was in high school I was already teaching younger grades in Sunday school and was playing the piano for and traveling with a Black gospel choir, all of whose members went to the Black high school while I attended the all-white high school, as the schools in Gainesville were still segregated.

    Playing the piano at the age of 15 and 16 for the gospel choir is a story in itself, as I essentially led a double life. My parents supported the 1960s civil rights movement and were labelled as “communists” by some in my small town. My white friends had no idea my family was as active as it was in the Black community. I managed to hide that part of my life quite well, as it could have been dangerous to let that be known.

    At this same time, my parents made the move into more evangelical, Pentecostal Christianity, becoming “saved” and “born again,” even while staying in the Episcopal Church.  They took me and my siblings to every Pentecostal church, evangelical meeting, healing service, “miracle” service, and revival meeting that they could find. Both parents became well-known retreat leaders and speakers and were involved on the local, state, national, and even international levels in various evangelical organizations. 

    I now see how spiritually damaging this was to me and my siblings. We were going to services that were highly emotional.  We saw people “get saved,” fall out on the floor, be “delivered” from demons, run up and down the aisles and speak in “tongues,” and we were expected to follow suit.

    We continued to attend the Episcopal Church, which although socially progressive, was very staid and formal to the point that  Episcopalians were known as “G-d’s frozen people.” I am the eldest and perhaps suffered less than my younger brother and sister, both of whom still struggle with religion to this day.

    College and beyond

    Once I was away from this and in college, I remained in the Episcopal Church even as I began questioning my Christian beliefs. In fact, I remained an active Episcopalian for decades, always wondering why I could not accept certain core Christian beliefs.

    After college, I worked as a newspaper reporter for three years before moving to South Bend, Indiana for graduate school at the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame, studying medieval history, literature and music.

    Studying the world of late antiquity, the development of Christianity, how Jesus became “G-d,” the emergence of the Catholic tradition, Catholic theology, and the medieval church, I began to have multiple doubts about the Christian faith. Questioning was not allowed, and one of my professors told me my beliefs were heretical.

    However, in medieval music classes, we studied the influence of synagogue chant on early Christian chant, and I was captivated by what I learned there.

    While in graduate school I remained in the Episcopal Church. My late husband and I met at the Episcopal cathedral in South Bend and were married there but became members of a smaller parish where our daughter was baptized and confirmed.

    I became the church musician for about four years, playing the guitar and leading the singing of all liturgical music and hymns. When an organist was finally hired, he and I continued to sing together.  Interestingly, apart from the liturgical music itself, most of the songs were based on the Psalms and writings of the prophets, and we often sang in English what I now know to be the Jewish song of redemption, Mi Chamocha.

    Years later, after moving to the North Georgia mountains in rural Appalachia, we immediately joined the local Episcopal church where we were very active.  I was a Sunday school teacher and was one of the people who read Scripture from the podium during the service.  There were three readings every week.  I always chose to be the person who read the “Old Testament” Scripture. 

    Interestingly, as I made my journey into Judaism, the priest of the parish and my friends there, along with my daughter (who is married to a Christian minister), were my biggest supporters.