Dread and Pride in Being Visibly Jewish

I didn’t really appreciate Hanukkah until the year I was living in Berlin, Germany. We had been living in Israel for two and a half years previously, and one of the wonderful things about living there was that the country ran on the Jewish calendar. During December you’d see menorah’s everywhere, hear Hanukkah music in the malls and you smell the scrumptious variety of sufganiot. Hanukkah was in the air and Christmas was nowhere to be found.

Then we moved to East Berlin where we were a one of a handful of Jewish families. During December Christmas was everywhere, decorations and lights lit up the homes, Christmas music played in the markets.

And celebrating Hanukkah in Berlin was so different than celebrating in Israel. Berlin has many reminders of the Holocaust. I would pass the memorial stars embedded in the pavement that were put in front of the homes of Jews who had been murdered in the Holocaust. As I took my son to kindergarten I’d pass a building on my street that had a plaque commemorating 44 kindergarten children who had been deported from that building and killed in the camps.

Everywhere I went there were reminders that being visibly Jewish had horrific consequences.

Yet, Hanukkah is a festival when we light the menorah in front of a window, proudly publicising the miracle of our survival. I was acutely aware of the dissonance of publicly displaying our Jewish pride while living in a city where my Jewish pride suddenly felt conflicted, on shaky ground.

If you had asked me if I was proud to be Jewish, without hesitation I’d have answered definitely yes. But my behaviour revealed something else. When the friendly shop worker turned to my son and asked him what he wanted for Christmas, I noticed that I just smiled instead of saying, “Thanks for asking, we’re Jewish and we don’t celebrate Christmas.” A part of me was rather uncomfortable being visibly Jewish.

It’s understandable. Growing up it wasn’t uncommon to experience antisemitic incidents. I had a raw egg thrown at me. Antisemitism is still very much here, and it can make us cautious about displaying our Judaism.

A few months before our first Hanukkah in Berlin, we had celebrated the arrival of our first daughter. We had given her the Hebrew name Hadassa. We weren’t super comfortable giving her a distinctly Jewish legal name, so we started to look online for a name that would be her legal name on her birth certificate. Googling popular girls name I noticed that quite a few of the names were distinctly Arabic. And I thought to myself if they can be confident enough to give their children such distinctive Islamic names, then so can I. Hadassa became her legal name as well.

A few years later, we were living in Western Canada and went away for a weekend to a small town called Fernie, BC. It was a delightfully scenic place in the mountains, with no Jewish population. We rented an Airbnb and one morning as my husband was praying with his tallit and tefillin, the owner knocked on the door. I answered the door as my husband went into another room; we weren’t comfortable for him to see my husband decked out in items that he would surely think were strange and bizarre.

Non-Jews respect Jews who respect themselves.

But our plan was foiled, as the owner needed to come into the room where my husband was praying. Indeed, he was intrigued to see my husband praying in full gear. He told us that he was a priest and that he was so impressed to see us living as Jews. He proudly told us that his grandmother – his father’s mother was Jewish.

There is much truth in the statement by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: non-Jews respect Jews who respect themselves.

With the rise of antisemitism today, it can be uncomfortable to outwardly identify as Jews. But I remind myself of the priest in Fernie, and the many other people we have met who noticed my husband’s kippah or my modest dress, and how being visibly Jewish was met with respect and a genuine curiosity, a curiosity that sometimes leads to conversations that educate and connect us to others.

Now, more than ever, we need to remember that living authentically as Jews engenders respect.