Returning To Judaism After Generations – OpEd
Recently, seven people traveled from Lisbon to London to meet with the European Bet Din (rabbinic court) of the Masorti (Conservative) movement. They officially returned to Judaism five hundred years after their ancestors became anusim (those who were forced to convert). In 1496, four years after the expulsion of the Jews of Spain, King Manuel I of Portugal, in an effort to strengthen his claim on the throne, married a Spanish princess. The Spanish demand for the marriage was that there be no Jews in Portugal.
Initially Manuel thought to expel them and some Jews did leave. However, fearing dire economic consequences, Manuel decided to compel conversion for all Jews in Portugal.
Somehow, their Jewish heritage and some portion of their traditions surreptitiously survived.
A decade ago, in Belmonte, a group of bnei anusim (“children of those forced,” sometimes known by the derogatory term marranos), returned to Judaism under Orthodox auspices.
Two years ago in Lisbon, approximately thirty bnei anusim formed a community and organized a synagogue. Supported by a grant from the World Zionist Organization Department of Pluralistic Religious Services, Rabbi Joseph Wernick of Jerusalem and Rabbi Chaim Weiner of London visited the group to provide them with a curriculum for study and practice. Rabbi Jules and Navah Harlow spent two weeks in September and again in December teaching Torah, instructing people in liturgy and mitzvot, and preparing some of the group for conversion.
These bnei anusim, now officially registered as Communidade Judaica Masorti Beit Yisrael, meet in a dilapidated building in space rented from a dwindling synagogue founded by Ashkenazic refugees from Eastern Europe. Until now, the bnei anusim secretly retained vestiges of their Jewish origins.
Rabbi Weiner explained, “They had no idea of the Jewish calendar. Initially they decided that Pesach would be the night the full moon lands in April, but that was too dangerous so they moved it to two days after the full moon. That was a safer time, when people wouldn’t be looking for them. They would go to the river and wade back and forth, waving branches over the water. For them, that was the crossing of the Red Sea, the Exodus from Egypt.”
Although initially hesitant about the resources to help this community of emerging Jews, Rabbi Weiner said, “Their enthusiasm made it impossible to refuse them. How could we turn [away] people who say they feel Jewish, who have suffered discrimination as Jews, who keep kosher and want to do more? Their Jewish identity burns inside them. It amazes me.” They hold regular Friday-night services and recently celebrated their first Shabbat-morning service.
Then there are people like Matthias Goering a 49-year-old physiotherapist, and a descendant of Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler’s right-hand man, is wearing a Jewish skullcap, with a Star of David pendant round his neck. After being brought up to despise Jews, he has embraced their faith. And although he has yet to formally convert to Judaism, he keeps kosher dietary rules, celebrates shabbat and is learning Hebrew.
Actually Matthias isn’t a “descendant” of Hermann. “His great-grandfather and Hermann’s grandfather were brothers”, which makes him a second cousin once removed. Still, the name got him and his siblings bullied after the war, while his family’s anti-Semitic tradition persisted through his military doctor father’s imprisonment in and return from a Soviet prison camp. When times were hard, Matthias says: “Our parents would say to us, ‘You can’t have that, because all our money’s gone to the Jews.'”
Things did not go well for Matthias. By 2000 his Swiss physiotherapy practice was bankrupt and his wife had left, taking their son. Broke and lonely, he was close to suicide, and says he prayed for the first time in his life. The same day his prayer was answered: a physiotherapy practice near Zurich offered him a job.
Mr Goering started attending Christian churches, but two years later began his journey towards Judaism. He says God told him “to guard the gates of Jerusalem”, despite his name and his family history. “I knew then,” he says, “I had to go to Israel.
Other descendants of Nazis have trodden the same path. Katrin Himmler, who published a book about the war crimes of her great-uncle, the SS commander Heinrich Himmler, married an Israeli. “It was as if we were predestined to meet,” she says.
Monika Goeth’s father was Amon Goeth, the camp commandant played by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List, who shot Jewish prisoners from the balcony of his villa. She has spent years seeking rapprochement with camp survivors. “I am completely drawn to Judaism,” she says. “Jews were the real heroes.”
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Jews in 1900 were %85 native to Europe.
2025, marry nonJews at a %61 rate