How to Digest

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Emilia Bertoli

she/her

Due to scheduling conflicts, Emilia’s portrait and audio recording are not included in this edition.

“So, I’m Italian and you don’t hear about Italian Jews that often, because Catholicism is such a large part of Italian culture. I remember around the third grade a lot of my friends were having their communions, and that's what everyone was talking about. And, my dad was raised Roman Catholic, so up until that point, I was like, ‘Oh, I'm interfaith,’ like

not really knowing what that meant. I just knew my mom was Jewish, my dad was Catholic.

We weren't super religious, you know, it was considered very religious

to even go to Shabbat services, like nobody really practiced like that.

We celebrated Christmas, but we also went to my aunt's house for

Passover, so I remember asking my mom, ‘What, what do I get?’ and she's like, ‘Well, you are Jewish, so you can have a bat mitzvah.' Back then, I wasn't really even sure what that meant because, like traditional Judaism wasn't passed down to me. So I made the decision like, ‘Okay, I want to have a bat mitzvah.’ And, that's how I built the community and how I really kind of started learning what Judaism was about. But, then I had my bat mitzvah, and I kind of fell out of it [Judaism] just because that was the only thing giving me that kind of structure.