Rocking Their Religious Identities

Religion is not only a system of worship; it's a way of placing one's self socially, a way of seeing oneself as part of a group of like-minded people who may dress, pray, vote and raise their children the way you do. And some faiths, including Judaism, are as much about being a people as theology, about having a shared culture and history.

Stories such as those of the Allens and Axsmiths are sagas of questions that go unasked for decades. For some, the discovery of Jewish roots simply reveals an interesting genealogical fact. For others, it creates deep confusion about identity.

James Montel's discovery in his 20s that his mother was Jewish, not Protestant, set off a bomb that left scars in his family of eight children. After a search that led him to the root cellar in the French countryside where his mother's family had hidden for months from German soldiers during World War II, Montel, 43, eventually became an Orthodox Jew. He is now a high-tech worker and lives in Jerusalem.

Only in recent years, Montel said, has he been able to speak frankly about the subject with his mother, who "tried to forget and repress" her heritage when she moved to the United States to marry a Lutheran soldier. With almost all his siblings, however, the subject remains taboo. Several became Southern Baptists, established in social circles revolving around the church in Fayetteville, Ark., where Montel was raised and where, he said, Jews were "something strange, people from the North -- Yankees." He recalled his siblings worrying about his spiritual state as he explored Judaism.

"At the point of their lives when they found out, it didn't fit, because they already had their core. They weren't about to go back to the drawing board," he said. "It caused a major upheaval in our family."

Yet there had been clues. His father's interest in Hebrew. The unexplained story of why his mother's family had been captured by Germans. The defensiveness his mother had about being a member of a church, where her name could have been put on a list.

But in graduate school, when he was researching the Holocaust and came across his mother's relatives' names on a list of Jews deported from France, he felt "very disoriented." He was angry about what his mother had gone through. He wanted to explore the new legacy.

But even as Montel became intrigued by the idea that he was Jewish, there were times when he was torn.

"Especially growing up in the South, where you hear a lot of hell-and-fire preaching, I think that is a scary thing, to decide I am going to be Jewish and not Christian," he said. Accepting that "remains a gradual, long process."

This year, he said, his son will have a bar mitzvah, a Jewish rite of passage that Montel did not have.

"It just tears me to pieces, this feeling that something was stolen from me," he said. "I don't have the experience to guide my son through this."

Jeff Geschwind was 13 when he learned that his family was Jewish, not Catholic. He remembers being frozen with terror: "I thought we were going to Hell."