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By Maia Ferdman
Junction.nu

Anna Nosková holds many identities. She’s both Ukrainian and Czech, both a journalist and a fashion blogger.

She is also Jewish. However, it was not until attending her first Junction event that she fully understood how being Jewish fit in with her other identities and into her everyday life.

Anna was born in Odessa, Ukraine, and grew up singing Yiddish songs and eating Jewish food. She moved to Prague with her family when she was five years old, where her grandfather teaches Talmudic law and where she first saw one of the most visited Jewish museums in the world. Through these experiences and many others, Anna always felt a strong identification with her Jewish roots.

However, she was still uncertain about how to act on these roots or connect to them in any tangible way. Her mother, raised under Communism, did not celebrate Jewish holidays. “Being Jewish was always an underground thing,” she said.

Upon moving to Prague, Anna often felt like an outsider as a Russian-speaker. When she was older, Anna’s family joined Chabad. However, she did not personally connect to the Orthodox approach to Judaism either. “As a teenager and in the beginning of my twenties I was interested in art and fashion, and I just wanted to fit in, study, and get a good job,” she said.

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