When my world didn’t feel right, I found a new one that fit like a glove

As told to Shoshana Gross

I

never met a chassidish person until the year I turned 13.

My home was traditional, but not particularly strict. Sunday mornings were dedicated to watching cartoons on TV, while Hershey bars and Wacky Mac were the tastes of my childhood (my mother didn’t like to cook much), and chalav Yisrael might as well have been a term in Swahili. My parents, the children of Holocaust survivors, valued education and success. The American dream was alive and well in my home, and my path forward was clear: college, a good job, marriage (at some point), and financial stability.

The school I went to was coed and I hated it. The boys were always teasing us, and their rough-and-tumble way of playing made me uncomfortable. By third grade, I felt completely out of place. The language my classmates used — not to mention the topics they discussed — made me uneasy. Yes, we had Israeli flags hanging on every wall, noisy Yom Ha’atzmaut celebrations, and we learned some subjects in Hebrew, but that was the extent of our Jewish education.

In the summer after third grade, my mother sent me to a small, yeshivish day camp run out of someone’s backyard. The daughter of one of her friends was a counselor there, and she encouraged my mother to let me join. For the first time, I met Bais Yaakov girls and understood that there was a different way to be Jewish. And I liked my new friends. I liked the way they acted. I especially liked the way they dressed. And I felt comfortable with them in a way that I didn’t at school.

Before the leaves could change color, I began asking my parents why I couldn’t go to Bais Yaakov with my summer friends. They just laughed and changed the subject, because this was a passing phase, right?