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Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/38240/full/38240/new-jew-recounts-journey-from-yule-log-to-gefilte-fish/ <br /><br /> <b>‘New Jew’ recounts journey from Yule log to gefilte fish</b> <br /> Thursday, June 4, 2009 | by amanda pazornik <br /><br /><p>Sally Srok, a Catholic from the Midwest, knew how to throw one heck of a Christmas party.</p> <p>Inside the New York apartment she shared with her soon-to-be husband, Michael Friedes, a collection of holiday music played on the stereo, with songs about mistletoe, Santa Claus and reindeer entertaining the guests.</p> <p>Their Christmas tree, festooned with duck-themed decorations, stood as the centerpiece of their annual gathering. Eggnog flowed like water.</p> <p>From the outside, though, one would have never known a celebration of Christmas was occurring.</p> <div class="capDivLeft" style="width: 216px;"><img alt="Aconvert" class="left" height="300" src="/images/uploads/z_photos_2009/zb06_05_09/Aconvert.jpg" title="Sally Srok Friedes" width="216" /> <div class="caption">Sally Srok Friedes</div> </div> Michael, a Jew from Manhattan’s Upper East Side, would not allow a wreath to be hung on their door. “It would advertise that we have a Christian home,” he explained to Sally. “And we don’t.” <p>Little did she know just how accurate that statement would become.</p> <p>In 1998, about six years into her interfaith marriage with Michael, Srok Friedes decided to convert to Judaism. Following two years of study with Reform synagogue rabbi in Larchmont, N.Y., she made it official.</p> <p>Srok Friedes, a resident of Piedmont who used to be a public relations and marketing professional, recounts her spiritual journey from Catholic outsider to Jewish mother in “The New Jew: An Unexpected Conversion.”</p> <p>On June 2, just two days after her son Harrison’s bar mitzvah at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco, Srok Friedes embarked on a book tour, with stops planned for New York, Milwaukee and Chicago.</p> <p>She’ll be back in the Bay Area this summer for signings at Afikomen in Berkeley and a small bookstore in Oakland. She is also scheduled to appear at the Contra Costa Jewish Book and Arts Festival in November.</p> <p>In addition, Srok Friedes plans to bring “The New Jew” to Emanu-El’s interfaith community and those in the process of converting.</p> <p>“I hadn’t found a story written in a candid way about what it’s like to go through the process of conversion and the culture shock, conflict and excitement that go along with it,” Srok Friedes, 44, says. “As my rabbi said, ‘There have been many how-to books. Yours addresses the how come.’ ”</p> <p>For Srok Friedes, the “how come” was a combination of factors, ranging from her lifelong pattern of thinking “outside the box” to an overwhelming feeling of “being at home” while she studied for her conversion.</p> <p>“I felt like I was already Jewish,” Srok Friedes says. “I came to this amazing realization that the tenets of Judaism reflected who I was. I wanted more of it, and I couldn’t imagine not making it official.”</p> <p>Before that happened, Srok Friedes endured her share of challenges. Initially, it was enough for her to adjust to a culture clash of marrying into a New York Jewish family. She was sure her mother-in-law, Bernice, always had envisioned a “nice Jewish girl” marrying her only son.</p> <p>Then there was the d’var Torah she heard at her first High Holy Days service, declaring that Jews should only marry other Jews. And the feeling of alienation when she first stepped inside a synagogue. And having to tell her Catholic family in Wisconsin that she’d be changing her beliefs.</p> <p>“Luckily,” Srok Friedes says, “I have a pretty incredible family.”</p> <p>Still, she recalls one of her brothers looking dumbfounded over the notion that someone would want to trade Christmas for Chanukah. Another asked if she could give up Jesus Christ as her savior.</p> <p>“I made [my conversion] less about me and more about us,” Srok Friedes says, referring to when she broke the news to her family. “Now, almost all of my family is flying out for my son’s bar mitzvah.”</p> <p>These days, Srok Friedes snacks on gefilte fish (“I love it,” she says), feels deeply moved when everyone sings the same song on Shabbat and gives to charities hoping her 12-year-old son, Harrison, and 10-year-old daughter, Olivia, will one day do the same. Her kids call her a typical “Jewish mother.”</p> <p>As for the Christmas tree, “I don’t miss it at all. I had it for so many years, but I don’t miss all the work that comes down to one night.”</p> <p>Good thing there are eight during Chanukah.</p> <p><strong><br />“The New Jew: An Unexpected Conversion”</strong> by Sally Srok Friedes (256 pages, O Books, $19.95)</p> <p> </p>

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