Prayer leader in Göttingen: Jewish family tradition will be continued
“In my family, my mother is Jewish, my father is not. And my mother, who also comes from Hamburg, was a young girl during the Shoah, hid during the Shoah, survived the Shoah in Germany, in Schleswig-Holstein.
Your father, who was a Jew, perished. And since she only had one Jewish father, she was not recognized by the Jewish community as a Jew, not even after the Shoah, so my mother had to convert to Judaism. She then went through a difficult test, a complete conversion, and was then just in the Jewish community.
Today she is not a practicing Jew, so that our family Judaism was dormant for several decades.
And why I’m the one who continues it has many psychological reasons too.
I think that I am continuing a family legacy that lay fallow and my mother is very happy about it. My father not so much and both also accept the path that I am taking, since I am now also raising my children in the Jewish faith. And yes - for my mother this is practically the connection to my great-grandparents, who were ultimately the last practicing Jews. The others stopped practicing. They were heavily assimilated in Hamburg. They were academic and no longer showed their Judaism to the outside world. They were just scared.”