First, I’ll have to explain how a young Dutch non-Jewish woman, New Age ex-hippie, ended up in the most Charedi Synagogue of Amsterdam on Rosh Hashana (Jewish New Year) of 5749 (September 1988).

 

When I was a child, our father told us that we had Jewish ancestry, through his father, grandfather, etc. some 8 generations back: a Jewish woman from Portugal was traveling the markets in Europe and ended up in Holland, marrying a Dutch farmer.

 

I didn’t think much about it while growing up but later, when I was studying Psychology in Amsterdam, it came back in my consciousness in the following way:

I had become a member of a large international group of people who were trying to end oppression in world through doing inner work on the emotional level: Re-evaluation Co-counseling. The idea was that we were all socialized in different roles as members of groups of oppressors or oppressed and that in both cases this process had been painful because it was creating a lie. If we would transform, discharge these frozen emotions, our innate pure, naturally good self would be revealed, and oppression would cease to exist.

This work was mostly done in workshops of a weekend or a week, with both ‘sides’ of one specific ‘oppression’ present: black and white, men and women, Jews and non-Jews, adults and children, etc. working separately and joined together at times.

 

After doing some workshops about other oppressions, especially black and white, I decided to go to a workshop about Jews and non-Jews. I was placed in the non-Jewish group of course. But somehow, I strangely felt out of place and I hardly had any feelings coming up, except for when we talked about the holocaust: then it was hard to stop crying. When working with both groups together, I recognized a lot of the kind of feelings the Jewish people were getting and discharging like deep fear and having had to deal with a lot of criticism.

 

Not long after that, I was at an international, more general, whole week workshop and again I noticed how much somehow, I resembled the Jewish participants in what came up inside me.

When driving back in my car with a few other people, one of them an Orthodox Jew, I told them about this. He asked me: ‘do you maybe have Jewish ancestry?’ I said ‘yes, I think so, but I’d have to ask my father to be sure.’ He gave me his address (he didn’t have telephone) so I could tell him what my father had said.

When I came home, I called my father at the first opportunity. And yes, he affirmed that we had Jewish ancestry. So, I wrote to my Jewish group-member: ‘Yes!’ He wrote back: ‘Welcome home!’ I was surprised: that made me cry! It felt like some distant bells starting to ring…

 

The next time that I went to a Jews and non-Jews workshop, they placed me in the Jewish group. ‘Because the prejudiced messages you received about Jews had not been only about ‘them’ but also about you.’ And indeed, here I started to have many more feelings coming up.

So I kept going to such workshops and also to a special ‘support group’ for Jews. In that group we were encouraged, for psychological reasons, to ‘get in touch with our roots’, to do religious things of our choice and then feel what feelings would come up and discharge them.

At some point, I decided to go to a Synagogue on Shabbat night. I ‘happened to’ live in a Jewish neighborhood of Amsterdam so there was a ’Liberal’ synagogue nearby and also an orthodox one (one of the most charedi of the city). I decided to try the Liberal one. I went all alone and I was very nervous. It somehow felt as if I had to walk through a very thick energetic ‘mist’ that was trying to stop me… but I kept walking and arrived there and I was allowed to come in.

 

It turned out to be a very disappointing experience: they had an organ and a choir, and it felt almost like a Christian church because of that. But something good happened too: after the service, there was a ‘kiddush’, a blessing of the Shabbat on wine, with snacks and drinks for the whole congregation. There I came to talk with a young woman my age, Hanna, who was there also for the first – and last – time. We totally agreed that the organ and the choir were not what we were looking for. She was also not-Jewish-with-Jewish-ancestry like me, and also into ‘spirituality’ like me. Once we were outside the building, she told me that she had met an orthodox family in a shop who had invited her to have a meal with them on Shabbat and that she would ask them if next time I could come with her. This was in the other Synagogue (‘Shul’) near my house, in a street named the Lekstraat. The family lived sort of inside the building, the father was the ‘gabai’ of the community.

 

The kind Orthodox family indeed also invited me, and before I knew what was happening to me, I found myself frequenting the most Charedi orthodox Shul in Amsterdam, 5 min. walk from my home, and was getting invited for Shabbat, chagim (holidays), and very soon also for learning about kashrut (kosher food), berachot (blessings), Torah, Biblical Hebrew, and much more!

The very first time that I entered that Synagogue I immediately felt and ‘recognized’ the strong ‘kedusha’ (holiness-energy, but not really energy, not from this world). I ‘knew’ this. I ‘remembered’ this. It felt like coming home!

 

Pretty much at the beginning of this period already, it was Rosh Hashana. I went to the Lekstraat Shul, of course, and then I heard the Shofar (ram’s horn) for the first time. This sound…it felt as if my Soul had always been flying high up, far away, out ‘there’ somewhere in space between the stars, but now this sound just tore her back to me, into my body! I just had to ‘be here’! This feeling made me cry uncontrollably and I couldn’t stop. I fled to the Ladies room and had to stay there for half an hour before I felt calm enough to go back to the service. Where, of course, I heard the Shofar quite a few times more. But now I could cope better and it just made me feel so deeply, deeply happy and strong and at home, that I could only come to one conclusion: there must be something like a ‘Jewish Soul’, and clearly I seemed to ‘have’ or ‘be’ one.

 

I had no idea what that meant. What was I supposed to ‘do’ with that fact? It took me many years to find that out and I am writing a book about that process and my general spiritual inner development to becoming a healer. This book is in the phase of revision now before it can be published. In the meantime, I am planning to post some nice passages here and on my Facebook page so you can already get a taste of it.