Why couldn’t I find anything on the family before her? It shouldn’t be this hard, I thought. She emigrated from Poland in the 1920s. There should be records. There should be … something.

But there wasn’t.

Frustrated, I went to my mother and asked her if she knew why I couldn’t get anywhere, why my efforts could only go so far.

She told me to sit down. And then, without a pause or a hesitation, she told me that when my great-grandmother came to the United States, she left her religion behind.

I knew my great-grandmother as Mary Swierczek. I knew her from pictures — a round-faced older woman that, my mother said, she didn’t remember meeting.

Her maiden name was Horovitz. And her given first name was Mina. She was a Jew.

My mother told me, as I sat there trying to absorb what she was saying, that Mina came here with her mother and the rest of their family had stayed behind, in Poland. As far as my mother knew, none of my great-grandmother’s siblings survived World War II.

Mina married a Christian, and she went by the name of Mary after she was married. She was married twice — her first husband died. Her children (my grandmother among them) were the Peszel family.

Mina’s children grew up with residual Jewish customs, and so did my mother. I sincerely thought, until about the age of 10, that all Christians ate matzos during Easter. Until very recently, my mother thought she used Polish expressions. Then I pointed out to her that they were Yiddish. She used to tell my sister and me to “go schluffy.” She called us “little bears” in Yiddish — because my grandmother had called her and my uncle her little bears.

And after my first Yom Kippur this fall, she wished me happy new year — in Hebrew.

It was like the proverbial light bulb had gone on in my head. This, I thought, explained everything!

As a child, my parents (a lapsed Catholic and a non-practicing Jew who considers herself Protestant) raised my older sister and I with very little religion. We were Protestants — but in name only. We had a Christmas tree and Easter eggs, but we didn’t go to church. We stopped going at my request, when I was 12.

I terrorized Sunday school teachers with unanswerable questions. Around the time my confirmation classes were set to begin, I asked my teacher how it was possible for the belief that Jesus was the son of God not to violate the Ten Commandments.

He looked at me sideways, opened and closed his mouth, and walked away.

In middle school, I had an assignment to present a report on an aspect of any war. I chose the Holocaust. I wanted to understand it, and I just couldn’t. I couldn’t imagine why something like that would be permitted to happen; I spent hours, then months, then years researching the psychology of that time and place. I took an in-depth course on the subject in college.

As a freshman in high school, I got a chance to meet with a man who liberated Buchenwald. I shook his hand and I swear I wanted to cry. A history teacher of mine had arranged it; the former soldier was coming to talk to the entire school about tolerance. When I asked her why she had set up the meeting, her reply shocked me. “I figure because of your Jewish ancestry, you’d want to talk to him,” she said.

During a family trip to Washington, D.C., I urged my parents to take me to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. They did not want to go — too depressing. I wasn’t taking “no” for an answer.

I was 14. I walked through that museum in a daze, snapping pictures of everything, amazed at the sheer volume of artifacts on display. And I was fine. I didn’t cry. I didn’t even want to cry.

Then I ended up in the room full of shoes.

The shoes engulf you, and it’s intentional. They are on three sides of you, as you walk into the room, and they’re piled at least up to waist height. On the wall, there are lines from a famous poem: “We are the shoes. We are the last witnesses ….”

I turned around to my mother, threw my arms around her, and started bawling. Nothing she or my father said could console me. The reality of the Holocaust was staring at me from behind thick glass.

There were baby shoes in that pile.

After my mother told me about our heritage, I spent a good month hating her. I couldn’t understand why she never told me before. But she insisted that she thought it wouldn’t make a difference to me; I was not a religious Christian, why would I want to be a religious Jew?

I got my sister on the phone and told her what had happened. She asked me to hold on a second. I could hear her talking to her Catholic husband in the background.

“Babe, did you know I’m Jewish?” she asked him. I heard him shuffling in the background, then heard him say, “Really? Wow. Cool.”

I started to look for more information on Mina Horovitz after that, and I found it. I found records from her arrival at Ellis Island. At the age of 19, she came over with her mother, Sarah. They went to a friend in the Bronx, and they came from Chyror, Poland.

I can’t find any record of where Chyror is — or was. I can’t track down her birth records, or my great-great grandmother’s ketubah, because of this. There are more than 20 different agencies that deal with pre-WWII records in Poland, and to request records from any of those, you have to know exactly where to look.

This could take me years.

I attended my first services at a Conservative shul in Old Bridge. And when I heard kaddish, though I didn’t understand the words, I knew what I was hearing, and I was overwhelmed.

Afterward, I spoke to the rabbi, Eugene Wernick. I told him everything, right down to the anger I was harboring for my mother.

His eyes twinkled. And he said something I will not forget for the rest of my life: “At least your mother wasn’t the Gestapo.”

He was right. There are worse ways to find out you’re Jewish.

I took his advice and read up on different types of Judaism. And after consideration, I decided Orthodoxy made the most sense to me. I went to services at several different Orthodox shuls — Congregation Brothers of Israel in Deal, Chabad services, Congregation Ohr Torah in West Orange — and eventually fell into a pattern that I love.

I keep Shabbos, and I keep kosher. Every Friday night, I visit with the Routhenstein family in West Orange who have “adopted” me. I talk to Rabbi Marc Spivak of Ohr Torah, which has become my regular shul, often. I pray every day. I’m starting to learn the Hebrew alphabet, and with the help of a transliterated siddur, I can get through services just fine.

I lit candles for Hanukkah with the help of a good friend, who wrote out the brachot for me. I sang the Four Questions at the Routhenstein’s Passover seder because, in the eyes of those present, I was the newest Jew at the table.

I have so many rabbis programmed into my cell phone that it’s actually frightening, and I’ve spoken to every single one. Most of them wanted proof before they’d help — birth certificates, ketubot, papers I can’t reasonably produce. And though one of them, an Orthodox rabbi from Lakewood, listened to me patiently (and with a look on his face that told me he sympathized and understood how badly I need to do this), a year’s worth of rabbis netted me no mentor.

Only recently did I find someone who could work with me, who was willing to take me on as a student, or, depending on his decision, a convert.

When Rabbi Shmuel Goldin of Congregation Ahavath Torah, Englewood, told me he’d help me in any way he could, I wanted to leap over his desk and hug him.

He gave me a reading assignment (Herman Wouk’s “This Is My G-d” and Maurice Lamm’s “Becoming a Jew”), and told me to give him a call when I’d finished.

Every page I turned reinforced what I’d thought all along — that this is the right thing for me, something I have to do for my soul.

“Just leave me a message at the shul,” he told me. “Tell whoever answers that you’re ready. Have them tell me that you’re done with the reading.”

I’m ready.

Lauren Matthew, editor of our sister newspaper, “This Is Highland Park,” is on the editorial staff of “The Jewish Journal.”