I've been working on a post about the Jewish community online, and how/where to find more people who might be living Jewishly, and talking about it. Interfaithfamily.com is one of those resources.
Many people hear about it for the first time when they are trying to get married. As most of you know, getting married interfaith can be a difficult proposition. Finding a rabbi willing to marry two people who aren't both Jewish, or committed to Judaism, can be a challenge. And what a difficult way to start building a Jewish family.
We were lucky when we got married. We had a wonderful Rabbi who married us, though the road was paved by my sister before me. We were also lucky in that we knew we were raising a Jewish family (the survey asked me what that meant to me, look for a post on that soon!). Working Dad has every intention (this is him talking, not me!) of converting. I've never pressed the issue, but taking an Intro to Judaism class as a first step was an easy commitment for him to make.
I think it's important to acknowledge that even though we are committed to raising a Jewish family, and that we consider ourselves nothing but Jewish, there is still an element of interfaith to our family. Every year we deal with the Easter/Passover and Christmas/Chanukkah debate. As we go through important Jewish rituals (baby naming/bris, bat mitzvah, mikvah, etc.) we have to be sensitive to explain these items to my husband's family, and incorporate them into our commitment.
In the next month or so I'll be chatting more about being interfaith- what it means to us to be raising our children Jewish, and how we can all make choices about religion in different ways to raise a Jewish family.
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