What does being Jewish mean to you?
By: Rachel Rodkin, High School Intern
What does being Jewish mean to you?
Does it mean learning Hebrew, lighting Shabbat candles ,learning our history or even eating gefilte fish!?
Being Jewish is more than knowing who Adam and Eve were and not eating meat and milk
together. Being Jewish is understanding the importance of our religion and embracing every part. I grew up in an Orthodox home, keeping kosher, celebrating Friday night and Saturdayafternoon Shabbat meals. I attended Associated Hebrew Day Schools for all of my elementaryyears and then moved onto CHAT for highschool. But it was only this past summer when I trulylearned what it really meant to be Jewish, while attending TJJ AP, an organized trip to Poland and Israel through NCSY.
We spent a week in Poland going to different concentration and death camps, children’s graves, ghettos, synagogues and more. While we were there, we learned about our ancestors who were murdered on the same grounds we were stepping on. Even more so, I began to feel their pain and the horrors of WW2. Walking through the gates of Auschwitz with the infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign above our heads, was a feeling I will never relive nor do I want to relive ever again.
This experience helped me realize that we did not receive Israel because of the Holocaust;, the Holocaust happened because we didn’t have Israel.
We were able to learn about all the people that fought with their lives in order to proudly live as Jews. These millions of people did not give up the fight for Judaism, our precious religion. We learned the details about all these Jews and the sacrifices they made for us to have a Jewish State. Seeing what they went through helped me find my path more clearly and understand the importance of my Jewish identity.
After going through such an emotionally raw experience like that, it was crucial for me to define my own identity and define what it truly means to me be Jewish. For me, this includes carrying on the legacy of the Jewish people while bringing my own personal twist and traditions along. After hearing many testimonies and stories in Poland about the millions of Jews that fought for us to have the State of Israel and proudly say we are Jews, it became clear to me that I needed to play a role in passing on their legacy to future generations. This means keeping all my diaries from the summer in which I wrote down some of the stories we heard and my thoughts and feelings about the deep topics we discussed and the horrors we witnessed. I feel strongly that people should hear these stories firsthand to keep the legacy alive by taking the time to read books and hear testimonies. While it is important to keep the legacy of the Jews who went through the horrific times of the Holocaust alive, it is also essential to keep the Jewish identity itself alive.
Everyone has their own meaning within Judaism. For some it may be keeping Shabbat and going to shul every week, while for others may be baking challah once a month. It does not matter what it is, but I believe in order to keep our religion alive and relevant to us, everyone should find one thing they would like to do to remind themselves of their Jewish identity, traditions, and beliefs. This is crucial in today’s times to ensure that our Jewish legacy is passed down from generation to generation and to remind ourselves what it means to be a proud Jew.
