By Mehra Rimer
GENEVA: This year I found myself the co-host of a not-so-kosher Hanukkah. What is a not-so-kosher Hanukkah?
You will understand once you have read my story.
I am Swiss, but originally from Iran. I am also a Shia Muslim, but I grew up in a Catholic boarding school in Switzerland run by Italian nuns. Needless to say, I know the Lord’s Prayer better than most Muslim prayers.
The nuns at my school never persuaded me to convert to Christianity. On the contrary, they always encouraged me to learn more about my own religion and its practices. Every year, I was tasked with giving a presentation about Islam to my classmates, and they even offered me private lessons to improve my Islamic education.
In my early years when I was in school in Iran, I was taught that Islam recognized Moses and Jesus and that Jews, Christians and Muslims all worshipped the same God. So for me there was nothing shocking about attending church services with my friends in Switzerland.
In addition, I was not the only non-Christian at the school, which was quite multicultural with students from all over the world –Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. Together from morning until night, we learned a lot from our different nationalities, races, cultures and religions, including how to live together peacefully.
Life at our boarding school was not always easy, but we found dealing with our different faiths was less of a challenge than the fact that it was an all-girls’ school.
The nuns always valued our differences. They encouraged us to show interest in one another’s cultures, which led us to build unique bridges. For instance, a friend from Haiti and I developed our own secret language — a mix of Persian and Creole — in order to communicate without being understood by others, especially the nuns. And still today I can put a face to Haiti, that of my friend.
I realize now to what extent my boarding school past was an exceptional experience and how much it has shaped my growth in our current global environment, which needs bridges now more than ever.
Today I continue to experience the importance of building bridges with others as part of a very colorful family which often reminds me of my boarding school’s melting pot. I am married to a Jewish Swiss man who was born in Canada. I have three brother-in-laws, one of whom is married to a Christian Orthodox Greek and another to a Zoroastrian Pakistani.
My husband accepts me the way I am and married me even though I did not want to convert. For him, it is as important that I help him pass on to our children his Jewish traditions as my Persian heritage. My brother-in-laws and their wives share the same philosophy.
The architect of this multicultural and multi-faith family is my father-in-law, a 77-year-old widower. He knew how to open his family to the world. Having grown up himself in a rather closed and homogenous community, he wanted his sons to be exposed to the opposite.
With a family like ours, the most natural question is how to deal with different holidays.
We celebrate a little bit of everything — with lots of love and open-mindedness. My husband’s favorite holiday is Orthodox Easter and he loves to eat the delicious kokoretsi, a lamb or goat dish, prepared for the occasion. My Pakistani sister-in-law and I share the same new year, Nowruz, which is an ode to spring. And we all celebrate many of the Jewish holidays with a few hours at the synagogue followed by a big family meal, which tends to be very noisy and animated with the presence of so many brothers, sisters and cousins.
This brings us to the not-so-kosher Hanukkah.
By coincidence almost none of the adults — most importantly none of the Jewish adults — in the family were in Geneva for the festival of lights that began on Dec. 1 this year and which commemorates the miracle of the container of oil which lit the Second Temple in Jerusalem for eight days, and the victory of the Maccabees, a Jewish rebel army in the 2nd century BCE.
Only my Greek sister-in-law and I were together in Geneva, which is how an Orthodox Christian and a Muslim ended up cooking apple sauce and small röstis, a Swiss potato dish, as a substitute for latkes, buying jam-filled doughnuts and celebrating Hanukkah with the kids.
Thank goodness most of them know the prayers and the songs, though I do confess that we wished one of the brothers would be here so they could come and help to make our Hanukkah a little more kosher.
Mehra Rimer is a translator at Search for Common Ground. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews),www.commongroundnews.org.
