Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

December 24, 2018

Having Returned to the Religion of His Ancestors, a Former Hidden Jew Remembers Christmases Past

It’s in his cultural DNA.

Around the time of Thomas Balazs’s confirmation into the Lutheran church, his father sat him down and explained that he and Thomas’s mother had been born and raised as Jews, survived the Holocaust in Hungary, and converted to Christianity upon their marriage to spare their children the danger and indignity of growing up Jewish. Thomas returned to Judaism in the fifth decade of his life. But it was several years later—ice-skating with his own son to the sound of Christmas carols the day before Thanksgiving—that he first found himself missing the Gentile holiday of his youth:

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