Mika sneaking a bite of challah.
My parents grew up in Israel, but they immigrated to the United States in their late teens and had me when they were 20. So they have spent most of their adult lives here and raised me and my two sisters in a place very different than the 1960s Israel where they were brought up (their families lived a few blocks from each other in a suburb of Tel Aviv and my father and mother first met at age 14 in the neighborhood pool).
One of the biggest adjustments for them when I was born was figuring out how to pass on Jewishness. It was never something they had thought about before. They both came from fairly secular Israeli families in which being Jewish was part of the air they breathed. It wasn’t anything they did. Judaism, for my father, was the intense quiet that permeated the streets of Israel on Yom Kippur. They knew that this was not going to be my world and they would have to do something to pass on a sense of connection. So they started celebrating the Friday night arrival of Shabbat.
Read more at The Jew and the Carrot on Forward.com
