A TV Show Instrumental in Changing My Life

I decided to blog about this, because

As I began on facebook...

A gazillion years ago, before most of you were born, there was a Jewish tv show on Sunday afternoons, and I'll blog about it and then put the link up here.

...When I was a little girl, in the middle of the previous century, Sundays in the USA were different from the other days of the week. The country was much more Christian. People were expected to be with their families on Sunday. Stores were closed. Only Jewish stores which had been closed on Friday night and Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath were allowed to open.

There was a different television schedule. Sundays, on one of the less commercial channels, there was a Jewish television show called The Eternal Light produced in conjunction with the Jewish Theological Seminary. Sometimes, out of boredom, I watched it. My family was not religious. We were members of a Conservative shul, because its relatively traditional ways of keeping Judaism and the fact that it didn't expect the members to keep kashrut, Shabbat and Jewish Holidays at home made my parents feel welcome. In those days, it was believed by most that Orthodox Judaism was on its way out, and Conservative Judaism was the Jew of the future. JTS was very strong and growing.

The episode on The Eternal Light that was Instrumental in Changing My Life must have been broadcast around the time of the production of the Diary of Anne Frank as a play. The play and the Anne Frank story got a lot of publicity, and I must have heard about it also in whatever Sunday School or Hebrew School I was attending in Oakland Jewish Center, Bayside, NY.

All I remember from the episode is a couple of men talking about what happened to Anne Frank and her family and what it had been like for Jews under the Nazis. There was a man who said very proudly and firmly:

"If I was forbidden to light the Chanukah Menorah, I wouldn't be afraid; I would light one even if it endangered my life."
His friend asked: "Do you light the Chanukah Menorah here in America?"
"No."
"Why don't you light it here, where you are permitted?"

That short dialogue stayed in my mind for years.  It was certainly one of the first little "seeds" planted in my mind about living a more Jewish Life. After we moved from Bayside to Great Neck we joined an Orthodox synagogue simply for financial reasons. The Great Neck Synagogue had an active NCSY chapter which I became a member of. I also went to YU Seminars. By the time I had graduated high school, I was a Torah Observant Jew. Considering that I remember the show all these decades later, it's clear that it was Instrumental in Changing My Life.