A Quote by Valentin Chmerkovskiy

Trying to fuse a Jewish-Russian family with a Mormon family from Utah definitely is a challenge. — © Valentin Chmerkovskiy
Trying to fuse a Jewish-Russian family with a Mormon family from Utah definitely is a challenge.
My family is Mormon. I'm not Mormon, but my family is, and my mom was like, "You're doing a show called Lucifer?! But I will admit, he is handsome, so I'll watch it."
Most of my family is still active in the Mormon Church. They live in Utah and Provo and Orem and Salt Lake City.
I was with a Russian family, and I couldn't believe that the grandparents in Russia, first of all I was shocked and delighted to find that the Russian family that I'd been told was so different from the American family, was exactly the same.
I was raised Catholic primarily by my mom's side of the family. But at 18, I found out there was an adoption in the family, and that I was of Russian Jewish descent on my mom's side. After that, I started to look more into the philosophies and culture of Judaism.
I didn't get the Russian Jew part because they didn't think I looked Russian or Jewish enough - and, mind you, I am both Russian and Jewish - so I was cast as the racist Mexican.
My mom's family is Russian Jewish, and my dad's Puerto Rico Catholic, so it's kind of a weird mix.
You're either Mormon or Southern Baptist in my family. They're incredibly conservative and I love my family.
If only one country, for whatever reason, tolerates a Jewish family in it, that family will become the germ center for fresh sedition. If one little Jewish boy survives without any Jewish education, with no synagogue and no Hebrew school, it [Judaism] is in his soul. Even if there had never been a synagogue or a Jewish school or an Old Testament, the Jewish spirit would still exist and exert its influence. It has been there from the beginning and there is no Jew, not a single one, who does not personify it.
When you have a Jewish mother who has a very strong Jewish family, it's very ethnic in its practices. Eating brisket, the food and the family and the interconnectedness for better or worse.
Religion is so focused on family. These days, for many people, being gay is also focused on family. The Mormon Church is especially focused on family, and I'd have hoped, therefore, that the Mormon Church would especially have celebrated how all of these people who might have been lonely and suicidal and childless are now able to lead this other life. I would have thought it would be a cause for immense celebration. Instead it has been, obviously, a cause of great concern to the Church and its leadership.
I love being from a screwed up family. We have everything in my family: prescription drug abuse, mental illness, one of my uncles is a Mormon.
I definitely have a strong sense of my Jewish and Israeli identity. I did my two-year military service; I was brought up in a very Jewish, Israeli family environment, so of course my heritage is very important to me.
There are two keys to productive missionary work -- (1) family-to-family friendshipping (when a member family shares the gospel with a nonmember family) and (2) cooperation between members and the missionaries to reach people...Every member knows of nonmembers he or she can refer to the missionaries. Every father, mother, and youth in this church should share the gospel by giving a Book of Mormon, telling the account of the Prophet Joseph Smith, or inviting our acquaintances to a special meeting.
That is definitely the biggest challenge, career and family, and learning how to balance.
My family is a Jewish Iranian family, but I was born in Turkey and raised in Italy. So it's a very mixed background.
For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish ora German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making "ladies" dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.
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