פתוח | איך הגיעה ביתו של הכומר מטקסס ליהדות? לכבוד שבועות, סיפורה של גרת הצדק ג'זליה ויאריאל

sorry thank you so much for having me here thank you for coming and your name is jazillia jesli yes yes the there's double fresh ken so i'm making a spoiler and saying that you're an orthodox jew today you live in you have six children and then another one really ticking on on on his way you weren't born jewish and you made a whole big long trip to be part of our nation can you tell us please when it all started and what were your life what what was it like then um i always grew up religious since i was born my parents um our past were pastors of a church and before that my grandparents were

pastors ministers and everybody involved for many many decades and so i was always considered religious and very involved in the church in my spirituality you know wanting to learn more about god and everything just changed when i was 17. um before that uh i come from a church where we did church on shabbat friday saturday explain us a bit because we we don't really understand nothing in the christian world ken so christians usually go to church on sunday on sunday that's their day of rest ours was friday sundown to um saturday evening it's nice you're talking with monsieur batman talking

about that and um and that's how we observed it i remember my parents would uh always tell us prepare your things iron your clothes before shabbat starts and uh no more tv yeah everything has to be turned off and we go to church on friday night we wake up in the morning saturday morning and we go to church all day long we do just avodah like you know all day but as a as a jew in israel i have to understand this because usually you go to church on sunday so it's a it's a it's a little um um amount of people that go to church on saturday you are part of a community it was part of an

organization it's called uh trijigon's seventh day okay and it kim's it came from the uh adventist movement and um there was a lady who started it who came from that branch and later on we found out that she uh was jewish wow you know it's generation after generation something was left there and then it's shabbat but you were not jewish it was not jewish went you went to church on shabbat yes what did you do there um we did uh singing we learned we learned whatever you know we had like davar torah but my my my father would teach about the new testament you know the christian bible and then

the old testament we we grew up like that we also didn't we didn't celebrate christmas we didn't celebrate no pagan holidays okay um all of that was um it was a sword for us wow it's a special um one kind of can yeah it was and also we uh we didn't eat pork we did it it was um it wasn't kosher for us uh we didn't eat unclean fish everything that's in in leviticus we didn't do any uh we didn't eat any of those unclean animals wow and and from the little um age from the very young age are you there a girl that is interested in what are we doing why are we doing this i mean there are girls that

ask questions all the time not next you know and they are girls that they just do whatever abba ima says did you try to understand what understand what's going on i understood from the very beginning like it was life for us we kept i went to a secular school that's how chris christians are raised you go to a school regular school and then you have your church life so because i was the daughter of a pastor my home life revolved around the church we were always busy every day preparing for the week when we eat we pray you know things like that i was very different from my the kids at my school

because of my spirituality and know and knowing what's good what's bad keeping myself at a distance from the from the bad influence wow so so that's how i just grew up it was just natural for me you know you're talking and i'm thinking a minute um as our live lives as orthodox israel all the world all over the world and a minute trying to imagine you as a girl and there are things that are really alike on yes yes i think so i think that's why i call myself uh you know the term ffb from from birth and also me i was just born like that just very spiritual and very religious my just my family

and i think what kept me more spiritual is that i started uh developing a love of music and dance when i was seven years old and i learned that outside of the church like at a studio a proper studio you know technique and everything and what i wanted to do is because i didn't fit into their box you know secular music i didn't want to do that what i did is i brought that gift that hashem gave me and i i put it in church with spiritual music it was my way of serving hashem you know yeah but you didn't call him that that kind of god god he said the ffb okay it's just making me think about bff

best friends forever but but then you're growing up and you're you're you're being a teenaged girl thinking about what you have here what was the minute that you understood that you're going to change something or was it the opposite way around you you looked around and you said look this is not exactly what's right to live as what happened there can you put us in your soul this girl that starts to think about what happened well the first thing it wasn't it wasn't me it was actually brought on from my mom for my mother my mother has always been a very studious person she loved to learn like

the bible she was always learning and like i said we didn't celebrate um pagan holidays we really didn't celebrate anything as a church you know a sabbath going church so my mom she just got bored one day and she said we're so boring we're boring christians because we don't do parties we don't do any festivals um so she said you know what maybe we do shabbat we're closest to you know the jewish people so let's let me see what there is there and so from there she started looking into the messianic movement i don't know if you're what is this messianic movement are christians who um who

incorporate jewish customs into christianity so it's like two together okay they say that um that their god um i don't know how to say yes um came to israel the prophecy oh they're very connected to to jewish religion they're yes they call themselves jews for jesus i don't know if you're familiar with that um i know that evangelist people they are there is a kind that they like israel very much and they are um really they they have similar ideas that are very good for the jews but i don't exactly know what's going on there no right they they believe they believe in their god and their messiah

that's jesus um but they feel like they're also jewish so they want to do all the festivals and everything like that but meshiah their mashiach is jesus and they still believe in the prophecy that he's that he's god that he's son of god and things like that so um so through them you came to israel that was part of our journey because we were still christian my father was a pastor so we thought okay this is the closest thing to us so we went through there my mom learned about sukkot about all the festivals and and then gus katie happened oh that was in 2005. right and because of kush katif my

mom she felt very connected about what was going on here she felt very moved and hurt for the people of amistad and and she just began talking to us about it and even to the church members like what's going on here and she wanted to come herself here to come help out um but my father didn't really want to because it's over here in in the middle east where it's war all the time and it's all this time you live in texas all the time we live in texas okay we can so that's what happened i think that was a turn of things that during this kushkatib evacuation my mom started listening to the news

here in israel but as she was listening to the news she started listening to all the rabbis shireem because there was rabbis like speaking all the time and she had never heard all the stories we only had what was in front of us the old testaments it's you know we don't have much more you guys have we have the oral torah we have everything in the midrashim and all these things and so rich knowledge rich exactly the good stuff yeah and the good stuff and so she um she started learning a lot and um one day she just asked yourself like these rabbis they're so smart they're so wise they're so holy

but why isn't it that they don't believe that jesus is messiah you know it was something that was she she didn't understand and so she went on her journey to research and from there this is all my mom's doing we don't know anything i have an older brother and a sister and at that time my husband was my fiance yeah and so his name is yourself daniel yeah that the the original name is jose right yes it's it's it's nice to understand that jose is yourself it's the same name yes and we kept our names he kept his name he just change it because it's jose and he kept it yourself so she came to

israel she didn't come to israel no not she didn't come at all my father thought it was um it was too dangerous for her to come so from this she sent my father here with my uh fiance at the time yosef and they got to learn the first time in israel when they went to kush katie they wanted to come like the good christian people like i'm here to help you know and the army didn't let them go it was a very sensitive thing so they ended up two weeks here walking around at israel this is a point i have to understand with you i have you now i can ask you questions so i don't have lots of people that

made such a journey i can ask so i'm asking you now they came to israel they wanted to help us right but their help wasn't really um they couldn't get in right and it's such a frustrated emotion that you want to give israel and you go you want to give jewish people but they like they they neglect you i mean push away can they push away did they talk about this feeling of them because it's not easy when you want to give and the other says lorote ken i don't think at that time they understood at that time we were very even though we knew about the jewish people we always thought about it as a

biblical term you know from people of old like the old times okay so when they came um they were they weren't looking for a deep thing as soon as the soldiers told them like no they understood maybe it's uh protocol you know yeah it's just a dangerous situation or something again later on as we're jewish you know we learned that we're you know the jewish people we have pain it's it's a very sensitive subject everything you know we hurt we've gone through a lot as a people and i think later on we learned to be like okay this is exactly what happened it wasn't so much that we push people off

it's that we're just very sensitive i think as a people oh zeophy that's nice and then your fiance comes with your father and they start to understand that there is an a rich knowledge that you can touch in your life that you could be together with yeah i think they they got to learn a lot about the jewish people how simple how true it really was compared to what we've been taught here also christianity when they did go to the christian groups here very different than what we were used to back in our own church and as they're here and they're traveling and they're learning more my mom is at

home selling all of her stuff because she wants to make aliyah and we're not jewish we don't it's like what will you do here yes exactly so i remember she sold all of our furniture i slept on a mattress on a bed and we were just telling everybody at church we're moving to israel we're moving to israel and i'm not understanding why but i'm excited because your mother was because my mother was but it was just it felt like a connecting time like we're coming back to it really did it felt like we're coming back to our roots wow you know i i know but i i i i admire your mother because she's not

here now but i see what she gave to the world you and i understand through what you're saying how as mothers we can give um feelings to our children even these um feelings of being believing in something being connected to something right i see your eyes now right no it's true it's true thanks to her you know we are where we are right now where did she bring this from i think from her father she my my grandpa from what i remember and what she tells us is that he was always very studious he always fought for the truth there was a time in uh during our church movement that they wanted to become

more radical you know more liberal yeah and my grandfather was always opposed to it he wanted to keep old customs from you know from what he was taught i know and i'm listening to you and something is getting to me very clear on you and your family because you're not jewish yet at this point when we talk but um there's something that in the jewish understandings we have generations of generations of genes you know we go um through these years and these days and something in your family is um keeping these exact things that this is us the jewish nation is is i'll say it in hebrew the ancient

massari we're keeping things and we're going through life through time but we are keeping things it's something very deep in us we're good at it yes and you had it in your family we did we did even to the point where um we weren't allowed to seek for our our spouses in another church in another church setting even sunday everybody who we who we thought we would you know later date and marry had to be within the church because the customs they won't understand the no celebrating christmas the going to church on sunday not on the sabbath so we um we made sure we connected with other churches

around like my uncle had a church his own church it still has a few of my uncles around texas so we always made sure that we connected to everybody so yeah the customs we we did hold on to it yeah yeah i see it and it kept us and shabbat kept us and shabbat kept you you know you know the the definition of we say in hebrew it's i think it's like people exploded all over the world and that's part of the history times and and then then we we come back to abu shaba sharma each one with his way but here here you are and then how how did all the convention happen uh from there i think my my fiance

my husband and my father they came back okay and my mom had already she's a pharmacist doctor she went to school and got her degree in pharmacy and pharmacy and she took a big break from work she closed herself off and day and night i didn't see her and she wouldn't come out she barely went to church anymore we knew that something was going on and eventually found out you know she called us in me and my siblings and she told us you know i've been doing a lot of praying a lot of research and what i've come to see is that we've been doing about uh zara and and you know we need to we need to get

out of the church we need to you know we need to just leave all this behind she explained to us with more things she was telling us look i'm comparing the bible there's a lot of mistakes in the christian bible itself it's leading us in the wrong way things were changed along the you know along these the years they were changed and um and i really feel like we need to to leave you you're making me as we speak now goose skin goosebumps goosebumps yes because because this is very special what you're saying to me now it was amazing it was a very hard time it was a very hard conversation but it

was a very refreshing conversation because i think i trusted my mom you trust me i trusted my mom she would never want to steer us into the wrong way she she was ahead of you know you look after your mom and you follow footsteps it's also very jewish listening to what abba says what emma says generation after a generation wow this was a big talk big deep talk oh it was it was very very deep um since i was very spiritual i think a little bit more than my brother and my sister i was more involved in church i just got it i feel like i got it and my only question at that point was ima like mom

what about my soul because as christians we believe that if we don't believe in jesus as our as our god or as a messiah then we don't have salvation you know so it's very hard for me to understand then what happens because he's in the middle we can't get to to god without him wow so she just turned around she told me you just got to be a good person and then god hears you you're connected to him straight exactly directly and that was a concept we never we never knew before and you relied on her i did i did and i was very excited and i was just relieved i felt like okay we're going you know

we're we're moving along you know i have friends that um were not jewish and now they are and it's all the time this question that you ask somebody what do you need this for i mean saying to you when to pray why to pray what to wear what to eat where to go this day stop the sun is going but you i feel now that this is not a question for you because when you have something that fires you from the inside it's not a question it's something that is outside there and you want to be part of and it's not asking you what do you need all these jewish rules for because because it's not a something that

it's on you it's something that comes it's other kind kind of people that convent you know you know what i mean convert yes convert yes um i think like i said i think music and the arts kept us really it's mine and my husband's mission it's our purpose why we're here and why hashem has us here and i think through that connection we just it's the air we breathe hashem he's like you know we can't live without him when we did for a while because after we left the church which was a few months after this we we all kind of went through our own journeys my parents went through their own journey i

was engaged so me and my husband wanted to get married we were planning a wedding my brother and my sister didn't want anything to do with religion after this they didn't know what to do they just were tired of it and me i just i think confused i think i was hurt because we left a lot of family we left uh my family didn't take it good i'm come from a mexican family and it's a big we have a lot of cousins and uncles so it was very hard for me because my wedding was something that's supposed to be big it was a small intimate thing where did you get married in texas still not jewish not jewish

but also not christian yeah it's it's it's like not here and not there yeah it's it was just stem i i guess i don't know yeah it was a period of time that you were not connected to them and not connected yet right it was and uh and uh that we just all went through our own journeys my parents wanted to convert right away they converted they left the church and a year later 2007 my mom and my dad converted me and my husband i think it took us a bit longer because we were so connected to church through music and that had kind of stopped yeah there wasn't any more you know every week we would

practice we would present in church like a concert yeah and that stopped all of a sudden it's also something social yeah that you have um you know all the love from the other people giving you existence very very much so i think we took a break and it wasn't until my i was pregnant after we got married a couple years later i got pregnant with my son um i come from like i said my i have an older brother and he has a son and at the time he was three years old and i remember i found out that i was having a boy and i told my mom i called my mom and i told him i called my brother and my brother

told me it was very sad for me why because my nephew um was diagnosed with a um with a sickness and he stopped uh being able to walk at a year old and so he went through a hard time my family went through a hard time dealing with this and at that time um my my brother was just hurting for me he didn't want me to for me to go through it so he told me if you need help you know i know how to help you take care of it meaning if you want to get rid of it you know it was a very hard thing and at that point i didn't understand where he was coming from i was more mad um and i spoke to my mom about it

and she told me look your brother's going through a hard time right now we were talking about god we were talking about spirituality you know something we hadn't done in such a long time and your nephew turns around and tells me grandma who's god at three years old and it broke my heart and so into so many pieces because since i was a baby my parents always taught us who god was at three years old i knew i knew who god was you know and it just felt like the disconnect from the church from spiritual spirituality just it disconnected them and my brother lost a lot of faith you know and god in

himself and everything and i just told my husband i don't want to go through that i don't want to bring my son into this world and not teach him who god is because i know who god is and um we made the decision there to be to take our conversion serious because we missed god wow we missed him you missed god what is making you cry now i think i put myself like um in that time you know how much we miss um when we go so far away from hashem you know and we just wanted to come back so wow so that's what made it you're a real jew i must tell you i'm sorry wow and and you know our tears they don't

come out of our eyes you know it's the end of the of the system of the tears right they come from the bottom of our hearts when we touch something very deeply and hashem is very deeply they say ghazal says that in each one of us we have inside of us hashem is inside here is outside there and we we only have to con to connect with when you're talking about a baby and a three-year-old boy and giving another generation the belief in hashem this is very deep for us jewish woman so how do you how do you go from that point from that point it um we got into the community there in our city and my

husband started a formal conversion we spoke to rabbis we told them we want to you know we want you to supervise us we want to we want to convert we had a rabbi there orthodox who went through the whole conversion process with us my husband started going to show regularly and learning i have to understand something in this month as an israeli how do you know while you are there doesn't matter in which country now which kind of of of of being a you went to this orthodox rabbi right because you knew that an orthodox way of being jewish is the best how do you know what to choose how do you know

what's right because there are all kinds of okay my mom did that research before when we were in church and she found um it was three categories at the time there was conservative reform and orthodox right so reform she felt it was too liberal for us especially with the customs like i said we were strict with our customs and then she thought orthodox was too much for us that they wouldn't let us in yeah and then conservative was okay let's try this one but when they went to it um they had some other things that my parents didn't agree that they did so um they decided okay so none of these

options we're going to orthodox either take us that they or they don't so we went to khabar wow that was there in um in in our city and then starts um emotion starts um a minute when you start to learn you start to learn you talk to the rabbi you tell them what you want to do what's it it's there and the rabbis have the custom of like turning away for our family for our family that didn't happen for some reason i don't know i hear a lot of stories of people having a hard time converting and being accepted in the community for us it was very natural we didn't have that problem and we were we

felt very welcomed from the beginning which i felt it was hashem you know like hurry come home making you hospitality in his his jewish places yes even the republican when i first met her the we met her on the shabbat um she offered me a job as a assistant teacher in her hebrew school wow i had just met her and she told me you need a job i'm like yes and she told me come work for me how how can you explain this hashem yeah hashem we have to know how much he's here when we need it him when we need him wow and then you start learning and learning what was the hardest thing to to learn i mean i

mean the the what did you like to learn more than the others holidays the ha game are my were my always my favorite because it revolves around around like the woman and her role you know with everything all the details of it preparing the table making it beautiful you know like it's our job to to set the mood do you still have friends from texas that ask you in a while what's going on with you or you don't ask us what's going on they see now that there's a lot of social media they see what's going on and what we do um before it was like this yeah after a while they see that we're not coming

back so so they accept it i mean they don't agree with it but they accept it like my my husband's parents are are not jewish he they're christian and so there's that common ground of like i don't agree with you but wow it's been a long time so we're we're you know honoring each other yeah and they come to israel to meet you wait wait i have a jumping in in time here because when did you come to live in ramad bachchan so we converted in 2010 by the time we wanted to convert it was the end of 2008 and then we converted in january 2010 so like it took us a year wow for everything and my um my

husband and i we had to separate because we had to get married again right under the hoopa and uh we had a second um wedding and then after that uh six months later we made aliyah like you had the white dress at the second wedding yes yeah yes uh rabbi yes neither rabbi said yes you felt yeah like getting it was ringing again yeah yes and because it's always been my husband also it was my only husband so it's the same person you know people talk about the last shabbat as non-jewish and then this first shabbat that you have to keep it because you chose this way of living you remember this

first shabbat i do i do it was um it was meaningful it felt it felt more spiritual i felt i felt at home inside i felt like i felt at home yeah you're a very spiritual girl what with your music today my music my husband and i we both work on music together um of course separately but we work on music together which is fun to do with my husband right now he performs all over the world he actually has a religious mariachi band also he does solo stuff he has a song with missing black and also he does a mariachi group that's performing and they have a lot of things going on and i also i do i

perform for women and girls wow yeah when we came here to israel i met a friend of mine i'm a very good friend and we both started a dance in music school and drama pachemisch for women and girls and it's something that grew into something big we started with 20 girls and then right now it has 200 women and girls wow something that was very needed um i felt during this whole time that hashem was preparing me because i did do it in my past life yeah and it wasn't to this caliber you know but when we made aliyah i felt like this is what you're preparing me for now i'm going to use it and be uh

you know and bring you more honor yeah i'm going to bring you more honor and do it the right way with these girls who need it they don't they don't know how it is and i've seen girls grow in their spirituality and just also an actu you know like togetherness through dance and music it just brings everybody together and the past two years i don't go to the academy anymore it's called the rbs dance and music academy my friend chicad now runs it and i'm just singing i'm performing and it's such a great thing my husband too we're making music we're trying to do our part to bring in market russia

into this world you know because that's what we breathe amazing you know it's like hashem plants in our life things skills that he knows we'll have to use afterwards but in a holy way in a very jewish way amazing he live in an orthodox place right yes to the neighbors do you feel that people look at you in an other way that sometimes somebody says or is everything it's again never i've been we've been very open with our history since the very very beginning and when we first started even people who converted they would tell us how are you so open yeah i don't tell people that people don't

know that i'm this or this and i'm like why and they said i don't know how you do it and i say i've never i've never experienced that everybody's been very accepting of us and i'm not embarrassed to say it i haven't told my my oldest because my oldest did the conversion with us when he was a year and a half we he had to go to mikbah also and so i tell him you also converted and he just had his bar mitzvah last year and he had to you know accept them in order to stay jewish and we tell him we tell our kids your parents come from this so that they know you know it's not something to be ashamed

about it's just a journey that hashem took us through so if your child goes to to the yard outside slips the slides and somebody another boy will tell hey you are they are built strongly and they know who they are they know who they are but i think also the community that we've been a part of they also accept it we've never had that problem exception yeah that's the world because you know i think you're doing something because this program is called patua in hebrew which is the world o the word open and when you put on the table open things you open them and you don't hide them right you can

be you you can be real and you can be born non-jewish and now doom is what kahala and and everything is okay openness is very important because you're able to show who you are you know and um throughout the years i think me being open i was able to also be open to learning from my community i always tell the girls in the community because uh i've had a big influence because of the academy i learned through you guys how to be the jewish woman i am from your customs from your diff being different from you being different from your families what they observe like i brought that all into my

family yeah and i think that's why i connect with so many people because it's like everybody i'm learning from everybody it's important to be open so i must ask you this last question sure do you miss something from my past life absolutely not maybe just my family having that big large family right now it's just my parents my brother my sister and my husband um i think if i had my cousins you know if they were also with us aren't they coming to visit sometimes no never no no no never come to you and and what did you say before about your husband's parents they they're not they're not jewish

they're christians but they do come to visit no they haven't come we've gone one time to visit since since we left america but um no it's just us but the community is like our second family when they will see this interview between me and you what do they what will they say to you do you think my family or the community both both my family i don't think they'll get it our extended family i still don't think they get it it's kind of like ugh here they go again with their story you know the community is very proud the community is very proud we um we're very known in the community and every

time we have something they're very very proud and supportive you know we have to finish now but that you you're making me think and i it was this meeting that day that um i said hi my name is efrat i'm a balachuva and then this woman says to me why do you always say this that you're a balachuva why why and after she went i was thinking deeply and i said to myself because this is who i am i wasn't religious i now am this is who we really are the shamatis right cecilia thank you very much for this talk thank you so much for having me you're lovely thank you thank you um