No easy answer

If you ask me what religion I am, I'll tell you I'm Jewish.

The real answer is more complicated. I was raised Jewish, but by a mother who wasn't. My British-born mother was about as not Jewish as you can get; her father was an Anglican priest. She met my father, a German-Jewish refugee, at the Library of Congress, where they both worked.

When my mother and father decided to marry, she stipulated that they do so in a church. My father agreed, on one condition: that the priest marry them not in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, but in the name of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

And so my parents were married in an Episcopalian church in Washington, D.C., in 1960. My father's parents did not attend. They moved to Switzerland shortly thereafter. You could chalk my grandparents' attitude up to stereotypical resentment of the shiksa goddess who stole their son. But it was compounded by the fact that all three of them - my father, my grandmother and my grandfather - had been prisoners in the German concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. For my father to marry a non-Jew after what they'd been through must have seemed a kind of double betrayal.

My mother's other condition for marriage was that their future children be raised as Christians. My father agreed. But something changed between my parents' wedding and the time when my two younger brothers and I were ready for religious indoctrination.

My mother's explanation is that she came to realize what Judaism meant to my father, a self-professed agnostic Jew. But instead of converting to Judaism, which my father would never have required of her, she chose to raise us, her children, as Jews.

In the 1960s there were no interfaith family groups at the local temple, no books on the subject that you could order from Amazon. But my mother was determined that we would grow up with religion, even if it wasn't the one she knew. While my father read books on the Holocaust with titles like "Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?" my mother was busy poring over "What Is a Jew?" She taught herself the basic Jewish prayers. On Friday nights, we sat around the dining room table, with a white tablecloth and the good Rosenthal china, while my mother lit two candles and said the Shabbat prayer, first in Hebrew and then in English. My father sat at the other end of the table and radiated contentment.

It's a testament to my parents' long and happy bond that my mother intuited what it would mean to my father to have his children raised as American Jews. It's true that we learned the being of Jewishness from my father, who simply was. But the doing we learned from my mother, who took Judaism's meaning to heart and passed it on.

As an adult, I underwent an official conversion - not because anyone required it, but because I wanted to take that step. Before the ceremony, I sat before a board of rabbis and told my story. "We don't consider this a conversion," one of the rabbis told me later. "We consider this an affirmation."

Deborah Sussman Susser is associate editor of Jewish News. Contact her here . A longer version of this piece originally aired on KJZZ, Arizona's NPR News Station.

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