I have been wrestling with whether I should contact someone in Judaism about this or not, my father would tell me this is ridiculous...
My father is an Episcopal priest.
My mother, who died in April, was raised Orthodox Jewish. She was baptized and converted to Christianity before she married my father, before she had children. She was raised in Brooklyn. She fell in love with my father in the early 1970s when he was in seminary, and she ran off to Michigan with him and got married. Her family sat shiva for her when she left and she never saw them again. I have never met any of her relatives. ... She somehow got a job that put her in a lot of contact with the Episcopal Seminary in NYC, and she met my father and eventually ran off to Michigan with him. The idea of my mother as a Jewish woman is foreign to me because for all of my life she lived the life of a priest's wife, teaching Sunday School, running the altar guild, busy with church stuff all the time, like any cleric's wife would be. She even taught in a Lutheran High School.
..You are probably wondering why I am telling you all this. Or maybe, being a cleric, you are accustomed to people unburdening themselves to you.
I am wondering if I am Jewish. A colleague insists that if I had a Jewish mother, then I am Jewish, even if my mother converted and was baptized before I was born.
This colleague insists that once someone is Jewish, they are always Jewish, even if they are baptized. I was, as you would assume, baptized as a baby. I was raised Christian. If someone told me I was Jewish, I would say they were being ridiculous. And my father would be saying I shouldn't bother you with this nonsense... I can just hear him, I can just see him rolling his eyes, saying there I go again, pestering people about things that mean nothing... but I guess I have a right to know. I also have obtained the address of two of the children of my mother's deceased sister. That would make them my first cousins. I am tempted to contact them... should I?
My sister is also sort of curious about this--wondering if this makes her children Jewish also. My brother couldn't care less.
Anyway, that's what I've got. What should I do, if anything? I don't especially want to be Jewish-- I'm certainly not going to be re-circumsized in public by a rabbi. I consider myself Christian... but I feel as if I should know what my "canonical status" really is, if there is such a thing.
Thank you for indulging my curiosity.
What do you think?
