JewsByChoice.Org

In 1994, I backpacked through Europe for 10 weeks.  While there, I met a Swedish Jew who wasn’t religious, but was very Jewishly knowledgeable.  His Jewish youth activities had taken him all over Jewish Europe and Israel, and he encouraged me to explore my Jewish roots.  While I didn’t care much for him as a person, I couldn’t ignore how refreshing it was to be with someone Jewish who understood and shared a key part of my identity without my having to try to explain it.  No relationship with a non-Jew had ever yielded that feeling of ease.

After returning to the U.S., I joined a Reform temple (where I knew I’d be accepted), began to learn Hebrew, attended weekly Torah study with the rabbi, and planned a trip to Israel.  Never having had a Jewish life cycle event for myself, I asked my rabbi to perform a conversion.  He assured me that it was unnecessary, but I insisted.  At the end of a year’s study, we met in the synagogue’s chapel: I, my rabbi, the cantor, the education director, and my parents.  I read a portion of the book of Ruth aloud, my rabbi made a short speech, gave me a Hebrew name, and presented me with a letter confirming my conversion with his and the cantor’s signatures.  There wasn’t a dry eye in the house; I was teary and emotional and floated out of there that day.

I know many JBCs who come from Christian or other religious homes have a lot to deal with at home when they make their choice.  Given who my parents were and how they felt about religion, I did too.  This Reform business was already beginning to wear on my parents.  Religion was and still is a taboo topic around them; it’s personal and should no more be aired in public than the frequency of one’s private bodily functions.  As long as we adhered to my parents’ American secular mum’s-the-word brand of religion, my parents were satisfied, but when I wanted more than that, my father got irritable and my mother became tight-lipped.  By having an unnecessary conversion, discussing Torah at the dinner table, and planning a trip to the Middle East, I was going too far.  They hoped I would get it all out of my system, and soon.

But I didn’t.  I went to Israel for a year-long program, originally planning to stay for 6 months.  Instead, I stayed 16.  I immersed myself in the program’s Hebrew, Jewish history and text classes, tiyulim (several-day hiking trips), and Israel-related seminars, then moved to Jerusalem where I worked at various jobs there and in Tel Aviv.  By then I had fallen in love with Israel, with Judaism, and with my fiancé.  In addition, Orthodox Jews, who I had always imagined were reclusive, eccentric, and smelled like fish, turned out (at least the ones I met) to be normal people with normal lives.  What distinguished them was that they engaged in Jewish life with the same intensity as they did in the wider world.  When I saw them, I began to see that I could live that life too.  I had come to Israel in part to transform myself into an eligible Jewish woman, and when I met my fiancé, after many conversations and much soul-searching, I decided to pursue an Orthodox conversion.