Mark Neugebauer’s father was a Polish Holocaust survivor, and his mother a Russian Jew whose family had suffered under pogroms, so he was raised with a strong Jewish identity. However,
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Dr. Joseph Johnson’s route to the Catholic Church was circuitous- he sought community with Jewish Christians, then got his seminary training in the Presbyterian tradition. Along the way, he began
Growing up in a Conservative Jewish home in suburban Toronto, I was a regular attendee at synagogue on Sabbaths and High Holy Days, and I lived a committed Jewish life. My father is a Polish Holocaust survivor from Auschwitz, and my mother’s family escaped the organized massacres of Jews in Russia.
My sister and I were raised in Canada in a Jewish, Yiddish-speaking environment where all our friends were Jewish, and Israel was our raison d’être. Christianity was the religion of the outsiders, the faith of anti-Semites and Jew-haters, the creed of the Crusaders, Inquisitors, Persecutors, and Nazis. Yet my mother would remind me continually that “Jesus was a Jew.”
