Penina Taylor’s Spiritual Journey from Evangelism to Judaism
P
enina Taylor is not your typical native of Lakewood, New Jersey. An articulate and accomplished professional in her late forties, Penina looks like any other frum North American Jew who now makes her home in Eretz Yisrael. You only need to speak to her for a few minutes, though, to discover that her life’s experiences — and her life’s mission — are hardly run-of-the-mill.
Born and raised in Lakewood, New Jersey, in a secular Jewish family, Penina discovered evangelical Christianity in her teens and married a Christian man. She and her husband raised their four children as religious Messianic Jews, and even established a Messianic congregation in Bowie, Maryland. Yet the story changed completely when the family moved to Baltimore in the nineties and began to connect with the frum community there. A major life change occurred, and today Penina is an outspoken antimissionary — countering the force that held her captive for so long.
This is her amazing story.
Penina’s early years were marked with tragedy. Although the world-renowned Beth Medrash Govoha was already in existence in Lakewood in the sixties,the yeshivah and all it stood for was a foreign concept to Penina and her secular Jewish family. After Penina’s parents divorced when she was only four, she and her only sister suffered greatly from the family’s restructuring.
“I suppose the seeds of Yiddishkeit were planted in me in fourth grade, when my paternal grandparents decided that my sister and I needed to have a Jewish education,” Penina says. “They sent us to a Hebrew day school in Lakewood for almost two years. However, none of this Jewish education stuck, since it was not reinforced at home. My mother would warn me, ‘Don’t tell me how to run my life and my home.’ I learned then that what I did in school stayed in school, and what I did at home stayed at home.
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