Post-Oct. 7, a Pittsburgher re-embraces her Jewish roots
Blumenfeld called the conversation a “catalyst moment” and said she walked away from it an atheist.
Like many Jews, Deena Blumenfeld celebrated the High Holidays at a synagogue this year.
But unlike many, Blumenfeld’s holiday experience at Rodef Shalom Congregation marked the first time she was in a synagogue since high school.
For the last 40 years, Blumenfeld considered herself an agnostic and “non-Zionist.” Her journey has run the gambit: a daughter raised in a typical Reform 1980s-era family; an agnostic who was religiously curious about non-Jewish traditions; and finally, a 50-something Jewish woman reembracing her faith and culture in the shadow of Oct. 7, 2023.
Growing up in a Philadelphia suburb, Blumenfeld and her family attended Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel next-door to the Conservative Beth Sholom. Her mother managed their congregation’s museum and Blumenfeld attended religious school.
“All of the seventh and eighth grade bar and bat mitzvah students were back and forth between the buildings all weekend,” she remembered.
Her school district, she said, was roughly 30% Jewish, which helped normalized her Jewish experience in a typical American suburb.
Her family didn’t attend synagogue every week, but they went every holiday. She attended Hebrew school and Sunday school, and sang in the congregation’s choir through high school. She had a bat mitzvah and was confirmed. She also spent summers at URJ Camp Harlam, the same Reform Jewish summer camp her father had attended.
On the surface there wasn’t anything unusual about Blumenfeld or her family. However, when she was 8 and her brother 5, Blumenfeld’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.
One day, Blumenfeld shared the family’s struggle with her rabbi while at religious school.
“I said, ‘Rabbi, I don’t understand this. God kills bad people — Sodom and Gomorrah, Noah and the flood…God kills bad people and he saves good people. My mother’s not a bad person. Why is God killing my mom?’ The rabbi said to me, ‘We don’t always understand what God does.’ I looked at him and said, ‘But that’s your job.’”
Blumenfeld called the conversation a “catalyst moment” and said she walked away from it an atheist.
She spent the next five years playing the role of an American Jewish daughter, albeit one that no longer believed in God, and shortly before her mother’s death, celebrated her bat mitzvah and began confirmation classes.
The classes, she said, provided more than religious instruction.
“We started talking about actual Jewish history,” she said. “It wasn’t simply when we were introduced to the Talmud. It was the history, the Babylonian exile and what happened to Jews over time. We talked about World War II and the pogroms.”
And the classes also covered the creation of the state of Israel.
Blumenfeld said one such lesson, taught by the same rabbi who was unable to adequately explain why bad things happen to good people, caused a second crisis of faith — a more personal and cultural crisis.
“I don’t know if this is what my 15-year-old brain heard the rabbi say or if this is what he actually said,” she recalled, “but he started talking about what happened to the Arabs, and he said something about how they left their homes and the Jews took over those homes. My head was like, ‘Did they just come in and take people’s homes? Is that what happened?’”
After class, Blumenfeld and a lifelong friend escaped to the library to process what they just heard. It was, she said, the start of her identity as a “non-Zionist.”
Blumenfeld was troubled by what she learned but stressed she wasn’t anti-Zionist; she understood the need for a Jewish state. Instead, she said, the lesson caused her to grapple with how Israel conducted its affairs and made her realize that she didn’t agree with all the Israeli government had done.
That wasn’t enough to motivate her to take to the streets in protest, but, combined with her atheism, it left her feeling untethered.
“I didn’t have words for it,” she said, “but I was like, ‘Am I Jewish? What does being Jewish mean to me?’”
In the end, it meant that Blumenfeld would become a religious studies major in college, learning about religions other than Judaism.
“For me, the conflict in my head was this mishmash of faith and community, the social side of being Jewish, the ethics side of being Jewish, and then there’s the history and politics and trying to figure out where my beliefs fit,” she said.
Even if she didn’t take to the streets carrying signs and shouting anti-Israel slogans, she did create some uncomfortable family get-togethers, often arguing with Zionist family members. She also raised her son and daughter without organized religion.
Her son, she said, is a staunch atheist, even receiving a scholarship from an atheist organization for an essay he wrote. Her daughter identifies as culturally Jewish but doesn’t practice the religion.
Blumenfeld said that during their childhood she felt an occasional pang of regret over missed family life cycle events and the traditions that go along with them — like choosing a dress for what would have been her daughter’s bat mitzvah.
Outside of a family wedding or funeral, though, Blumenfeld was a happy non-Zionist, an atheist of Jewish descent for most of her adult life.
Then Hamas launched its Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel.
Blumenfeld said she felt a visceral reaction similar to what she experienced after Al-Qaeda’s Sept.11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center.
“It was fear, but it was more than fear,” she said. “It was the adrenaline of motivation.”
She felt the attack physically, in her bones and through her DNA, she said.
“It was epigenetics, because we’ve gone through so many massacres and so much trauma and the murder of Jews and the pogroms and everything else over the centuries.”
Slowly, Blumenfeld began to reintegrate Judaism into her life.
“I started lighting Shabbat candles because I didn’t know what else to do,” she said. “I started reading. I read ‘Exodus’ again.”
She also started wearing a Star of David, and eventually put a pro-Israel sign and Israeli flags outside her home.
Ironically, Blumenfeld — who spent most of her life not supporting the Israeli government or its prime minister and arguing with family members over the treatment of Arabs inside of Israel — had her house vandalized in April shortly after she put up the flags. A Nazi slogan was painted on the sidewalk in front of her house.
It wasn’t the only difficult experience she’s had since she re-embraced Judaism.
The same friend with whom she once hid in the library to discuss what they saw as Israel’s historic wrongs no longer speaks to her, the result of an argument about her friend’s social media posts, including one egregious cartoon that was credited to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
“It was very hard because she and I were friends for 45 years,” Blumenfeld said.
She also has endured people advising her that if she didn’t wear her Star of David or hang flags then she wouldn’t experience a backlash. That argument doesn’t make much sense to Blumenfeld.
“If a woman is wearing a short skirt and gets raped, we don’t say she deserved it,” she said. “I didn’t deserve it because I put out an Israeli flag.”
This fall, Blumenfeld attended Rosh Hashanah services at Rodef Shalom Congregation.
“It was a mix of familiarity and comfort, but also feeling a bit like an outsider because I had never been to Rodef for anything,” she said.
The feeling of being an outsider quickly faded as Blumenfeld encountered a coworker, and Jewish geography took hold when she learned the coworker is a daughter of her cousin’s rabbi.
For Blumenfeld, it’s the familiarity and comfort that provides a sense of security, if not answers to all the complicated questions with which she still struggles.
“There’s only one or two degrees of separation because we’re all Jews,” she said. “We are all related in some way because there’s so few of us. Every Jew knows every other Jew in some way.” PJC
David Rullo can be reached at drullo@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.
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