Their ancestors hid from the Inquisition — now they’re coming home

IN fourth grade, Genie Milgrom was brought to the priest in charge of her Catholic school. She’d asked too many questions, had challenged too many of the inconsistencies in her education, and the nuns felt she needed guidance. “You should pray for faith and enlightenment, or you will fall off the path of the righteous,” the priest told her.

Genie learned to keep her doubts private. If she was fascinated by the Jewish people she met, she didn’t share it with her Cuban-American family.

Even as an adult, married with two children, Genie still felt an intense connection to Judaism. She lived in Miami, in a Jewish, though not religious, area. As she began to explore this connection and learn everything she could about Judaism, she found herself at odds with her husband. Eventually, they divorced, and one of their agreements was that if she chose to take her fascination with Judaism further, she wouldn’t try to convert their children.

With renewed determination, Genie found a Reconstructionist synagogue and began to learn about what it meant to be a Jew. “Then came Rosh Hashanah,” Genie told Family First. “The speaker was great. And then we get to the meal, and it was shrimp.” She knew enough about Judaism to knew that shrimp was definitely not kosher.

Genie was bewildered. Was she drawn to a religion that didn’t exist anymore? Was the Judaism that she’d studied a thing of the past?

One day, she walked into a tiny Orthodox shul, an old house with red tile on the floor. It felt like home. She told the rabbi she wanted to become Jewish.

It wasn’t easy. The beis din was wary of this woman whose children couldn’t convert. For more than half a decade, Genie struggled through the process. “They had me memorize the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch. I mean, read, write, memorize Hebrew, the laws of Shabbos, and all the kashrut laws. They really put me through a very hard time. But I persisted.”

Her family wasn’t happy. Her children struggled to understand the changes happening in their mother’s home. Her father didn’t want the trouble it would bring to the family. Her mother was resistant, and her grandmother told her, “Mariti, what you’re doing is very dangerous.”

Genie was on her own.

She converted and remarried, this time to a Jewish man, Michael, and began to build a new life, separate but still connected to her family.

And then, one Friday, she got the news: Her grandmother had passed away, and she would be buried immediately, as per the family custom. It was an unusual custom for Cuban Catholics, and it meant that Genie would miss the funeral on Shabbos. She was heartbroken.

The next day, after the funeral, Genie’s family arrived at her home, all dressed in black. Genie’s mother had brought something for her: a box that Genie’s grandmother had wanted Genie to have on the day she died.

Genie opened the tattered white box to find a tarnished hamsa and a small gold earring with a Magen David in the center. There was no note, no explanation. Only two Jewish objects, passed down from her Catholic grandmother to her.

Memories came to Genie, little oddities from her childhood: an antique Spanish shawl, pinned over hers and her groom’s shoulders at their wedding. Her grandmother breaking eggs into a glass to check them for blood before using them. Scrubbing porous vegetables to clean them of insects. Baking bread with her grandmother, wrapping a small bit of dough in foil and tossing it into the back of the oven “for good luck.” Sweeping toward the center of the room (an old crypto-Jewish custom to respect the place where the mezuzah used to be).

A lifetime of subtle Jewish customs, revealed all at once.

Mariti, what you’re doing is very dangerous.