for anyone interested in folklore & judaism:
TIL there was a Jewish presence in the specific town my ancestors were from at some point (not just Moselle in general) -- which isn't a lot of information but does make me feel a little less like a mad man trying to figure out where some family customs came from.
for context i was raised Catholic, am Agnostic, considered converting to Judaism (i'd still like to but there are circumstances), but -- my grandmother, a devout Irish/Roman Catholic specifically, had a few practices that aren't traditionally Christian. they could be folk, but i dont know. there's a lot of possibilities and i dont know where to start.
the customs & how i learned about them
she took care to tell me when i was a little girl about how she would tie red strings to cribs to protect her babies from evil. and after she told me, she had me get me sister (who's 3 years younger) so she could tell her about it too. she wanted to make sure she heard.
also, after my great-grandmother died, we had a traditional Irish/Roman Catholic funeral process/wake (for anyone who doesn't know, this means a church service, memorial service, and burial (Roman), and a wake i.e celebration of life held at my great-grandmother's home with all of our family (Irish)).
then, this is where it gets nontraditional xianity-wise. we all went home and had scheduled times to visit. my family was the 2nd or 3rd day after the funeral/wake, and when i walked in the door to my grandmother's house, i went to look in my favorite mirror. except it was covered.
i went around the entire house and every mirror was covered. they had an entire bathroom with mirror walls and i honestly dont remember how they handled that but i do remember being totally bewildered. all the portraits were covered as well - but the landscape paintings weren't.
all the chairs were either put away or turned upside down, except for stools and my grandfather's recliner. my grandmother's recliner and all the larger seating (couches) were covered in tarps. i distinctly remember my grandmother going to get my mother a chair, but me, my sister, and my father weren't meant to sit down. i remember being in the kitchen and hoping up on the stool - it was really uncomfortable, but my grandma said it was a good thing because we're in mourning.
as i was wandering around the house, i ran into her in the dining room. i asked her why the house was like this, and she told me that it was because great-grandma (her mom) died and that everything would be back to how it was in about a week. i remember so clearly how she knelt down to me and gently spoke. she asked if that answered my question, and back then, it did.
but now, it doesn't. and i can't ask her any questions. she had alzheimers and cancer, and she died in 2020 during the start of COVID. i tried asking her siblings at her funeral, but they said they didn't know. they were both too young to meet our family from Europe before they died. her sister, Ruth, told me that it sounds like something they did "in the Old Days," but that's too vague & uncertain to really help.
though, one last thing: at my grandmother's funeral, after the traditional Catholic burial and prayers were done, my family started going around, picking up rocks, and setting them on her grave. some of them grabbed two because my father's baby sister is buried there as well. i looked up at my dad and he told me to grab a rock. so. me and my sister grabbed the prettiest rocks we could find and set them there.
i asked him later if that was something they did. he said that every time he and his parents visited his sister's grave, that his mother would set stones while his father would bring/plant flowers.
TL;DR: Catholic Irish/German/French grandmother tied red string to baby's cribs to ward off evil, did something very similar to Shiva after her mother died and had me participate in her home (but not my mother or her husband), and my dad's mom's side has a tradition of setting stones on graves, but my dad's father does flowers.
And I am trying to figure out how we got here.
Even if it takes me the rest of my life I am going to find the answer behind this because it's important to me, no matter what the answer is.
But uh. I could use some help if anyone happens to wanna.
