Nancy Fordonski - July 29, 1982
Assimilation of Community
Uh-huh.
religion, from about Christianity. They had their class.
Do you know the degree of assimilation in your town? Was there--did the uh, Jews become non?
There was one incident. I was that time very young. I remember we had one man, he had a family, he was a Jewish man, he was not uh, he was uh, not a religious guy. And uh, he had a family and a few kids. And one day people were talking about him that he's planning to convert.
Mm-hm.
This was the biggest shock, even to, to children in the city. We could really--we couldn't understand you know, something like this, because we knew that you are a Jew, you are suppose to live as a Jew or you are religious or not, but you are born a Jew, you're supposed to die as a Jew. And here all of a sudden, something like this happened. But this was one incident in the city.
Did you find that Jews um, just stopped practicing Judaism?
You see, later on it was uh, like it was closer to the war and I was getting a little older and I understood, under...understood a little more. So they had uh, different organizations. Revisionist, now actually Zionist is the same, but uh, there was Betar and they had different groups, different organizations for the youth and then they had a few older people what were guiding them. Those were groups that I can say that they didn't observe the Shabbos, the Sabbath like, like a Jew. Uh, by saying a Jew I was brought up a way that I thought if you aren't doing everything accordingly you know, the way your parents and your teacher and your rabbi is telling you, it's already a big crime. So I know that there were some of them that they didn't observe the Sabbath or uh, like I would say uh, if they were smoking a cigarette on Sabbath this was already a crime, or if they didn't uh, go to daven, they didn't prayer, they didn't perform their prayers, this was already something wrong too.
© Board of Regents University of Michigan-Dearborn