New Branches

Pau

la Hellman approaches the Jewish holidays with conflicting emotions. The 60-year-old education director at Hevreh of Southern Berkshire, a reform congregation in Great Barrington, Mass., has grown more deeply involved with the Jewish community in recent years, but her daughter Tara has chosen a different path. She married a Baptist in 1995, converted to his religion and is raising their child Caleb in that faith. "Each year, as I get ready for the High Holidays, I think how much I miss sharing the holidays with my grandson," she says. "I love Caleb so much and want to support his path to God, but when I see the children from my congregation running around my backyard and eating bagels and cream cheese at break-the-fast on Yom Kippur, I just wish Caleb were one of them."

Hellman might be frustrated at times, but she isn't angry with her daughter. If anything, she blames herself. "You ask yourself if you should've done more religiously when your kids were younger," she says. And she has moments — like when her grandson shows her something he has made in church — that clutch at her heart.

It's not an uncommon feeling for many grandparents today who, like Hellman, face a new generation following different religious practices. Although there are few hard statistics tracking the incidence of interfaith marriages in decades past, the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey (the latest year for which results are available) reported that about 28 million adults, 22% of the U.S. population, lived in mixed-religion households. Many of those who are parents end up choosing one religion for their kids.

That can leave grandparents confused, with few places to turn for advice. "Often [grandparents] have no one to talk to about ways to cope," says Sheila Gordon, president of the Interfaith Community in New York City. While many synagogues and churches have focused their efforts on welcoming young interfaith couples and providing strategies for raising a family, Gordon says grandparent issues are often shunted aside.

To help fill the void, several nonprofit organizations have cropped up with advice specifically tailored to grandparents. A Jewish nonprofit advocacy organization and website, interfaithfamily.com, provides an archive of articles about grandchildren in mixed-faith marriages. Dovetail Institute (dovetailinstitute.org), a nonprofit, nondenominational group, is also devoted to interfaith families. And Manhattan's 92nd Street Y began offering a course this fall called "Workshop for Parents of Interfaith Couples."

For many, religion comes with a slew of traditions and rituals that have been cherished over a lifetime, and when that can't be passed down to the next generations, the emotions run deep. "The initial reaction to hearing that your grandchild is going to be Muslim or Catholic when you are not," says Edmund Case, publisher of interfaithfamily.com, "can be a trauma — a huge sense of loss." Grandparents aren't always ready to relinquish the idea of sharing the family christening gown or family togetherness at holy days. One devoutly Catholic 72-year-old grandfather in Greene County, Ohio, speaks of a sense of hurt and emptiness that not one of his 10 grandchildren is being raised Catholic. "I feel deprived of the richness of the dreams I wanted to share with my grandkids," he says. "It's a sadness I deal with, even though I try not to show it."