Dr. Heinke Lillenstein
When asked to share why I wanted to create a Jewish legacy, I thought it would be an easy task. Being a convert to Judaism and a Jew by choice for the past 60 years, I made a personal commitment to being Jewish and have always been proud of my choice. Creating a lasting commitment through the Bene Israel Society allows me to continue to contribute to my chosen religion and to the future of the temple that has always been very welcoming to me.
I was born in Germany toward the end of WWII and came to the United States with my mother in 1952 to Ontario Center, New York. I did not speak English at that time, but was very fortunate that living next door to our home was an Orthodox Jewish family who owned the local general store. Their youngest daughter was my age and we became best friends. Due to keeping Kosher, Brenda was limited in being able to spend time in my home. However, I had no such restriction and spent a lot of time with a family who spoke Yiddish and I spoke German. We could understand each other!
After a year in Ontario Center, my family and I moved to Rochester, New York, but Brenda and I remained friends to this day. She was my maid of honor when I married my husband Mark in 1964. Throughout high school, most of my friends were Jewish, as was my future husband whom I met at the start of my senior year of high school while he was a student at the University of Rochester. I knew I wanted to convert and for us to become a Jewish family. Mark and I both attended my conversion classes and my formal conversion took place before our wedding because I wanted to be married by the rabbi of the temple we were attending.
After our marriage, Mark and I moved to the Buffalo area where we both continued our studies by alternating working and going to school full-time so that he became a lawyer and I earned a PhD in psychology. In the interim we added three children to our family – David, Laura, and Jacob. Eventually Mark and I moved to Delevan, New York and became the only Jewish family in town. This made it important for us to become part of a larger Jewish community and we were instrumental in creating a temple group, Temple Beth Shalom, with other isolated Jewish families living in the rural towns south of Buffalo. Over the years our group generally had about 25 families. We never had a rabbi and the members of our group shared the responsibility of preparing services. We celebrated all our holidays together and truly became a family over the many years we were together. Our children all had bar and bat mitzvahs, often tutored by Israeli grad students from the University of Buffalo or by various members of our group. All of the children were tutored in Hebrew. (My children were even able to earn independent study credit in high school for their Hebrew!)
After our daughter and our youngest son came to the Cincinnati area, married and started to have children, Mark and I decided it was time for us to also have a home in this area and we bought a condo in Florence, Kentucky. (Our older son is in eastern Pennsylvania.) When Jake married Lauren Gross from Rockdale Temple, Mark and I decided it was time for us to also become involved with Rockdale. (Our temple group in the Buffalo area had disbanded due to the children of our original group having left the Buffalo area and the numbers had grown too small to continue to sustain the group.)
I hope I have answered the question regarding why a Jewish legacy. Mark died two years ago, but he would have supported this decision because both of us believed in a responsibility to support Jewish ideals and institutions. This is more important now than ever before.
