“The COBT experience is hardly one-size-fits-all, and many of us had (and have) a relationship with our non-frum families”
Thank you, Bracha Gan, for your incredibly well-written article on having BT family. The article had my family in stitches. Everything was so relevant and true!
I want to add another factor that I’ve experienced as the child of a BT: the stories, the family legacies, the mesorah — or the lack of them. While the family legends include something like Great Grandma Phyllis’s matzah ball soup that flopped at the family Seder, there weren’t stories of mesirus nefesh to be proud of, like my friend Sarah’s great-grandmother who joined the Bais Yaakov movement in its early stages to keep clear of the Haskalah Movement, or Bracha’s great-grandfather from the Lower East Side who received a pink slip every Friday because he refused to work on Shabbos.
My family history is a bit different, something like the drama you see in a Bais Yaakov play, when Hinda’s struggling teenaged son stalks out of the house, slamming the door with a, “My name isn’t Baruch anymore, it’s Boris now,” as he goes to join the Communists. Or when Herschel was faced with the choice whether or not to come to the factory on Shabbos, and he did show up to work.
Us BTs and children of BTs learn to write our own story. And I like to think that there is part of the story that no one on this Earth knows. When Baruch/Boris slid down the slippery slope of Communism, his mother, Hinda, sat by the window with her tear-drenched Tehillim, davening for his return. And as Herschel got on the boat to sail to Ellis Island, his father bentshed him with emotion with the strength to remain a Yid. And although many years have passed, Hashem hasn’t forgotten this. I believe this is part of the reason why many BTs are frum today. These are our stories of glory.
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