Marrying with faith

Published in The Post-Star (D1)
4/16/06

When Joy Muller brought her first non-Jewish boyfriend home at age 16, her father -- an Orthodox Jew -- was furious.

"He told me that if I married someone like that, I wouldn't be his daughter anymore," she remembered.

Unlike most other major religious groups, Jews share genes as well as a belief system. They don't actively seek converts to the faith, so there is only one logical way for their population to survive: give birth to more Jews.

But in recent years, more than half of the 5.2 million Jews in the United States have married outside the faith, according to a 2001 survey by United Jewish Communities. And that number is likely to increase -- in the same survey, 75 percent of single Jews said they date both Jews and non-Jews.

"In a free society, people fall in love and get married, and often pay no attention to the religion in which they were raised," said Rabbi Richard Sobel, of Temple Beth-El in Glens Falls. "Depending on one's understanding of Judaism, that could be a very difficult thing."

For the Mullers, preserving a Jewish identity was an especially sensitive issue. Both of Joy's parents grew up in Poland, where they had endured the horrors of the Holocaust.

"My father said he saw soldiers throwing babies out of windows and shooting at them like ducks," Joy said, choking up.

They raised their daughter to respect her religious tradition, but they also taught her to look beyond race.

"I was always taught that the most important thing was that everyone in the world needed to be respected, treated fairly, and free," she said.

Shortly after college, at a country-western dance in New York City, she met a young man who shared those values.

His name was Gary McCoola, and he was Catholic, but that didn't matter much to either of them.

And so, in 1984, Joy Muller became Joy Muller-McCoola.

She is among a number of local families that have proved that interfaith marriage doesn't necessarily require religious sacrifice.

Last week, the Muller-McCoolas hosted a Passover meal, called a Seder, at their home in Glens Falls.

They shared the meal with several other local mixed-faith couples -- what they jokingly call "half-and-halves" -- as they have done for the past 15 years.

Muller-McCoola, a vivacious woman with a streak of red in her white hair and bright green eyeglasses shaped like wings, sat at the head of the table. Her teenage son Jacob sat nearby, sporting long corn-rows and a T-shirt with Hebrew lettering (embarrassing side note: turns out it wasn't Hebrew, but a logo for a popular punk band).

It wasn't exactly an orthodox Seder -- they dyed Easter eggs before the meal, and read from a homemade haggadah that mixed modern poetry with ancient Scripture -- but any Jew would have recognized the items on the table; parsley and salt water, representing trials and tears; matzah, an unleavened bread that commemorates the hasty flight of Hebrew slaves from Egypt; and plenty of red wine (cherry soda for the kids), because the meal is supposed to be a celebration, after all.

Among the guests were Michael Panken and Cathy DeDe, who have been married for 19 years. Panken comes from a secular Jewish background, while DeDe is a Christian who grew up steeped in the Catholic tradition.

"Both of us are definitely spiritually attached people, but neither was actively going to church or temple when we met," she said.

When they had children, they started attending Temple Beth-El.

"We wanted our kids to grow up with some kind of spiritual base," DeDe explained. "And it turned out that our oldest daughter, Anna, really felt an affinity for the temple. She was happier there than she was anywhere."

A dozen years later, they are active members of Temple Sinai in Saratoga Springs. Both of their teenage daughters have had bat mitzvahs, and Panken teaches Hebrew in the religious school.
DeDe is involved in temple life, too, but said she has never felt the need or desire to convert to Judaism.

"I say jokingly that going to temple makes me a better Christian," she said. "And I've been studying Hebrew. It's my text, too -- what my family calls the Bible, I call the Old Testament."

Her family celebrates all the major Jewish and Christian holidays, and traditionally hosts a Christmas Eve party that includes mixed-marriage couples like the Muller-McCoolas.

"We're the opposite of what you'd expect -- my husband married outside the faith, and the world now has three new Jewish people, because faith is now an important part of his life as well as his children's," DeDe reflected.

Rabbi Sobel hopes this will become a trend. His congregation of about 110 families includes several interfaith marriages, and he said it doesn't make sense to reject them because the non-Jewish partner hasn't converted.

"If you reject those marriages, then you're liable to turn the Jewish partner off from participating in Jewish life and the synagogue," he said. "You're really missing the opportunity to influence and hang on to a lot of potential members of your congregation and the Jewish people. You have to decide what's more important."

As for Muller-McCoola, her parents ultimately decided that their daughter's happiness was more important than anything else.

"After a couple of visits, and hearing from me that Gary was a good, decent, caring person, they were OK with it," she said. "My dad adores him now."