The conversion

The picture of me was taken in Norway about a month before I was abducted. I still look happy and content, as opposed to the pictures taken after I was abducted where I look withdrawn and wary. The outfit is so very 70's, and so cute. Whenever I look at this picture, it reminds me of the life I could have had if not for the abduction. My mother doted on me, and the outfit, lovingly hand-sewn by my mother, reminds me of the time and effort she put into her parenting. My father had no fashion sense, and I was always sloppily dressed, and parented, by him.
In this picture I am a non-Jew. That was soon to change, unbeknownst to my mother at the time.  Since my father is Jewish and my mother is not, according to Jewish law I was not considered Jewish. To be raised as a Jew, I would need  to undergo a conversion ceremony. My father became an ultra religious Jew when he abducted me, a smart move on his part as the tight-knit Orthodox community was a great way to hide from the police and Interpol, the international policing force who were looking for me to return me to my mother's care.
I was converted to Judaism within a year after we arrived in NYC. My father told some people that my mother was dead, that she didn't want me, or was mentally ill. There was always another story, depending on where we were and what would sound best.
The tight-knit Jewish community, especially back in the 70's, was not informed about parental child abduction and most didn't think to question my father's claims. Since he wanted to raise me as a Jew, they agreed to convert me to Judaism. I needed to go through a special conversion process to be a Jew. This required immersion in a ritual pool, called a "mikvah" in Hebrew, a small pool made of stone and filled with rainwater. In the Jewish tradition this is considered a process of renewal or purification, a form of rebirth for the person who is converting. I was going to be born again into the Jewish faith, and leave the past, my mother and my Norwegian roots, behind.
I have strong sensory memories of the mikvah. The physical memories are of walking the stone steps into a deep, cold pool with my father, and then getting unceremoniously dunked under the water 3 times in succession. There were strange men there, I am sure they were the rabbis who were supervising the conversion, watching from what felt like very high above me. There was an air of mystery, while the room smelled of sour water, and the feeling was one of vulnerability. It felt wrong to be in the dark water in a stone pool on the top floor of a synagogue somewhere in Brooklyn; to be so little and be doing something that felt so BIG, so huge. I was given a new name that day, Sarah Zissel, and I was told that I was a different person when I walked out of the mikvah that day. The implication was that I was a better person somehow, though it was not expressly said. Clearly, the old me was not good enough, and I was supposed to be happy that I had been admitted into the fold despite the fact that my mother was not Jewish. It was supposed to be a joyous day, my first day with a new identity.