Anusim Puns

I want to celebrate Hanukkah this year. Being that I'm descended from Sicilian B'nei Anusim, a holiday about defying forced cultural assimilation/cultural genocide has a lot of meaning to me. However, I'm not in the process of conversion. I have been pursuing Humanistic Judaism but it doesn't have a "conversion" process so much as an "adoption" process and I'm already considered Jewish by their standards since I'm zera yisrael.

How should I go about this?

I found out that I'm a b'nei anusim, all of my surnames are on the list that I found on the internet. Can anyone shed some light on what this means?

I was raised publicly catholic but privately Jewish, and I am the first to openly practise Judaism in my mother's family for many generations. I am also going through the process of obtaining Spanish citizenship.

After many years of trying to unravel some of the family secrets, I know personally what a difficult identity it can be to understand. I am happy to try to answer what I can from my personal experience and research AMA.

Edit: Thank you to /u/Elementarrrry for setting this up, those who participated and those who just lurked and read. I hope I was able to answer some of your questions, and if you have any more feel free to PM me.

Yesterday I found out that one of my Grandma’s sisters got her ancestry DNA test results back and it turns out that she has Jewish ancestry. I don’t know the exact percentage but it was one of her main ancestral groups along with Italian.

I did some research and it turns out that my great-great grandmother’s maiden name- Brancato- is a Jewish-Sicilian surname. I also looked at one of my family trees and it turns out that, through my great- grandmother’s father, I have a 4x great-grandmother whose maiden name was Bonanno, another Jewish - Sicilian surname. I also learned that Naro- the village that my family comes from- had a sizeable Jewish population that was wiped out during the Spanish Inquisition.

So long story short it turns out that I’m very likely descended -at least in part- from Sicilian Bnei Anusim.

Knowing this is actually a great relief to me because I've been batting around the idea of conversion for a while now and one of my biggest stumbling blocks, ironically, is the idea of letting go of my Sicilian-Catholic heritage. Now, instead, I see it as throwing off something that was forced on my ancestors and reclaiming something that was taken from them.

First of all. I love this subreddit. Very knowledgeable and great people.

Forgive me for bringing up this negative topic but I need to know if anybody has sensed or knows of the root of this ‘animosity’.

I have been conversing with plenty of Bnei Anusim and I am a Bnei Anusim myself (going through an Orthodox Conversion). The following are just some straightforward examples but I do not mean to generalise all Bnei Anusim. I will say that the following has been very prevalent in my experience.

Bnei Anusim #1: For more than 3 years, he has been trying to find evidence to prove that he is a halachic jew (good for him) however, I asked him how it was going at the Sephardic shul (I go to an Ashkenazi one) and he told me that Ashkenazim had taken over and that Ashkenazi Rabbis don’t care about Bnei Anusim finding out about their roots. They just want us (Bnei Anusim) to convert. I asked him if he was following any practices and he answered in the negative.

Bnei Anusim #2: This person told me that he is Jewish and when we started talking more about his family and roots, he was very vague. All he told me is that he qualified for the Certificate of Return. (Is this recognised in the Orthodox Community?) Regardless, at one point, he said something similar as Bnei Anusim #1, about Ashkenazim not caring about recognising or giving proper recognition/helping out Bnei Anusim.

Bnei Anusim #3: This person told me he is Jewish because they found out his family carried certain diseases that are prevalent in some Jewish populations. He goes to a shul where the rabbi is very proactive about bringing Bnei Anusim into the Jewish fold but without a conversion, apparently. This rabbi pushes for certificate of returns.

I completely agree in that I wish there were more resources for Bnei Anusim. More often than not, someone of Jewish descent is told to just convert, esp. if you are not of European stock. And for some people, this is hard esp. because it might seem there is a racial hierarchy. And, a lot of people don’t want to be viewed as converts because they can’t help but see converts as not being real Jews. As I once heard, “Oh, the convert?” which was said in a derogatory manner by a Jewish-born Sephardic woman at a Sephardic shul.

These are some things I have noticed talking to many Bnei Anusim and I want to know the reason behind it.

Some of these Bnei Anusim have a grudge against Ashkenazi. Why?

Some of these Bnei Anusim are more likely to feel conscious

I have a suspicion that my ancestors were Sephardic, and later Anusims (forced to convert to Christianity). If this happened to you, why did you suspect you were of Jewish ancestry at the very beginning? Any traits or traditions were carried on in your family that you later realised were Jewish?

I don't want to step on anybody's toes here, but the amount of non-dad jokes here in this subreddit really annoys me. First of all, dad jokes CAN be NSFW, it clearly says so in the sub rules. Secondly, it doesn't automatically make it a dad joke if it's from a conversation between you and your child. Most importantly, the jokes that your CHILDREN tell YOU are not dad jokes. The point of a dad joke is that it's so cheesy only a dad who's trying to be funny would make such a joke. That's it. They are stupid plays on words, lame puns and so on. There has to be a clever pun or wordplay for it to be considered a dad joke.

Again, to all the fellow dads, I apologise if I'm sounding too harsh. But I just needed to get it off my chest.

Do your worst!

I'm surprised it hasn't decade.

For context I'm a Refuse Driver (Garbage man) & today I was on food waste. After I'd tipped I was checking the wagon for any defects when I spotted a lone pea balanced on the lifts.

I said "hey look, an escaPEA"

No one near me but it didn't half make me laugh for a good hour or so!

Edit: I can't believe how much this has blown up. Thank you everyone I've had a blast reading through the replies 😂

It really does, I swear!

They’re on standbi

Pilot on me!!

Nothing, he was gladiator.

Dad jokes are supposed to be jokes you can tell a kid and they will understand it and find it funny.

This sub is mostly just NSFW puns now.

If it needs a NSFW tag it's not a dad joke. There should just be a NSFW puns subreddit for that.

Edit* I'm not replying any longer and turning off notifications but to all those that say "no one cares", there sure are a lot of you arguing about it. Maybe I'm wrong but you people don't need to be rude about it. If you really don't care, don't comment.

When I got home, they were still there.

What did 0 say to 8 ?

" Nice Belt "

So What did 3 say to 8 ?

" Hey, you two stop making out "

I know, "germany germany", the promised land etc. But if they know that Germany isn't possible, then why not claim "asylum" in Belarus? Is it because Belarus won't allow them to claim asylum or is it because the migrants themselves don't want to?

Edit: I know that they're not actually refugees. The more correct term is economic migrants.

I won't be doing that today!

Since "Liturgy" is not synonymous to "Genetics", a thing that the Jews today sadly do not know, and because the Ashkenazi rite had took over Europe as a whole in the 16th Century (Yiddish replaced many smaller local Jewish languages) while Sephardic rites took over the Oriental World (sans Yemen, mostly); I find myself write this post for any Jews interested. I will mention each diasporal group by their demographic weight:

1. Eastern European Jews - The Jews who sat from Russia in the East to the realms of the Polish Border are not stemmed mostly/only of the Ashkenazim who settled in Medieval Northern France and Germany. These Jews are recorded to have set all over these lands all along since the 2nd Century AD and have been around and kicking while Ashkenaz was still a functioning Jewish Culture. They are estimated by Cecil Roth in 1969 to be twice (if not more, by others) in size than the Ashkenazim by the year 1500. It may be that they're mostly descendants of Jews who fled from Turkey in the 7th Century and later from Iraq and Persia, where half of the Jews had settled in exile and were mostly found at till the 12th Century AD. There is a reason to suspect some may be of Khazar descent, as well as descendants of locals who married into the Jewish communities throughout the region (as in any Jewish diaspora). The reason why people today have German sounding surnames is that their ancestors have lived under the Austro-Hungarian Empire that forced all it's surnames-lacking residents to adopt names in the German language which the rulership used (the higher you paid, the better name you have got from the clerks; "Stine" and "Berg" were among the cheapest as far as I know, while flowers cost more..) between 1787 to 1831. These folks eventually migrated during the 17th Century and onwards westwards to the other part of Europe and their descendants became part of the newly established Jewish communities in Austria, Germany, France and beyond (Dutch Jews, for instance, were found to be genetically distant as heck from German Jews but closer to both EEJ and Dutch Non-Jews). There are 2 recorded clusters amongst European Jews, one is probably what was the one which stemmed from the historic Ashkenazic (sadly no Archaeogenetic study was conducted that I'm aware of..) and the other is from the Eastern European Jews who adopted the name "Ashkenazim" later on.
2. Sephardim - The descendant of the Iberian Jews. They were estimated to have been at above 400,000 by

[Removed]

Where ever you left it 🤷‍♀️🤭

This morning, my 4 year old daughter.

Daughter: I'm hungry

Me: nerves building, smile widening

Me: Hi hungry, I'm dad.

She had no idea what was going on but I finally did it.

Thank you all for listening.

There hasn't been a post all year!

You take away their little brooms

Because she wanted to see the task manager.

It was about a weak back.

Why

(I posted this in /r/judaism and wanted to post it here as well.)

I want to celebrate Hanukkah this year. Being that I'm descended from Sicilian B'nei Anusim, a holiday about defying forced cultural assimilation/cultural genocide has a lot of meaning to me. However, I'm not in the process of conversion. I have been pursuing Humanistic Judaism but it doesn't have a "conversion" process so much as an "adoption" process and I'm already considered Jewish by their standards since I'm zera yisrael.

How should I go about this?