It was just last week, on Rosh Hashanah, that I finally decided.

A holiday that meant little to me growing up.

As a diaspora Jew raised in Southern California, being Jewish never seemed very important. Sure, my mother was a Holocaust survivor whose parents and brother had been murdered by the Nazis. And I vividly remember marching in a parade honoring Israel’s “Bar Mitzvah year” in 1961.

Being 12 at the time, I undoubtedly wondered about my own upcoming religious rite of passage. Alas, it never happened. Because my dad was an atheist raised by Methodists and my mom, well, she was still terrified of being Jewish.

That was driven home to me as a child one night by a knock on the door. It was the early 1950s, and Dad had set up an amateur ham radio station in the garage, inadvertently assaulting the classical music broadcast that regularly soothed a neighbor’s sleep. Annoyed at her inability to dream, she angrily called the police.

The resulting 10 pm rap-rap was loud enough to startle a horse. Glancing through the window at the dark uniforms outside, Mom gasped and held a hand to her heart. “Oh!” she barely managed to moan as her face grew deathly pale. Then, trembling, she turned and marched into the bedroom, where she remained for the next several hours.

Later, after regaining enough composure to cautiously re-emerge, she tried to explain what had happened. “When I was your age,” Mom began, “we lived in a country filled with very bad men.”

That country, I later learned, was........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)