Converts Becoming Jewish during times or places of Danger

President-elect Donald Trump picked Morgan Ortagus as a deputy to Steve Witkoff, his special envoy to the Middle East. Trump struck a lukewarm tone about the decision, highlighting her past criticism of him and suggesting her appointment was influenced by other Republicans.

During Trump’s first term, Morgan Ortagus was part of the team that worked on the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and four Arab nations. She also held positions in both the Bush and Obama administrations. Morgan Ortagus, a former evangelical Christian, converted to Judaism in 2007. Donald Trump’s daughter is also a convert to Judaism.

Jeannie Suk Gersen writes in the New Yorker Magazine (12/2/2024) “I was raised in a Korean American evangelical church, where people spoke in tongues as the Holy Spirit moved them. My Bible teacher referred to me as “devil’s spawn” because I had a habit of picking arguments with Scripture. (Eve’s lust for knowledge wasn’t sinful, I remember declaring; God’s curse on humankind was an overreaction.) By the time I reached adulthood, I’d developed an emphatically rationalist world view, which for a while I thought precluded religion.

But I knew the first books of the Old Testament cold, and I still sometimes prayed to God. I also nurtured a nascent affinity for Judaism, born of both disposition and circumstance. My father, a physician, did his medical residency at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, where his department chief was an Orthodox Jew, and he’d occasionally serve as a “Shabbos goy,” turning on lights for the religious doctor on the Sabbath. Like many devout Christians, my mother was fascinated with Israel, and she visited the country often.

In 2023, on Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, my friend Rabbi Angela Warnick Buchdahl of Central Synagogue, a Reform congregation in New York City, gave a sermon focussed on atoning for the “sin of passing judgment,” and in particular judgment of intermarriage. Rabbi Buchdahl has a Jewish American father and a Korean Buddhist mother.

I’ve known her since we attended college together, in the nineteen-nineties, when she already seemed poised to become the first East Asian American Jew ordained as a rabbi. She reached that milestone in 2001, and has built a robust following within her congregation and beyond.

When Rabbi Buchdahl travels, even Orthodox Jews stop her to share that they watch her services, saying, “Don’t tell my rabbi!” I live-streamed her Yom Kippur sermon from my home in Cambridge, along with people in roughly a hundred countries.

Rabbi Buchdahl drew a contrast between the Bible’s Ezra, who promoted the idea of a Jewish “holy seed,” and Ruth, a Biblical model of conversion. A Gentile by birth, Ruth married an Israelite and, when she was later widowed, told her mother-in-law, Naomi, “Wherever you go, I will go. Wherever you stay, I will stay. Your people are my people, your God, my God.” Ruth became the great-grandmother of King David, an ancestor of the future Jewish Messiah. As Buchdahl later put it to me, “We’ve been a mixed multitude all along.”

Plus, in her experience—contra fears about conversion “diluting” Judaism—those who join the faith often “make their Jewish spouses more Jewish.” Buchdahl invoked Rabbi Alexander Schindler, a former leader of the American Reform movement, who made the front page of the Times in 1978, when he pressed Jews to seek converts. Proselytizing is often understood to be anathema to Judaism, but Buchdahl told congregants, “Throughout Jewish history, you should know, whenever Jews felt safe, we sought new adherents. This moment in America should be such a time.”

Two weeks later came October 7th. Hamas invaded Israel, massacring some twelve hundred people and kidnapping two hundred and fifty more. Israel, in turn, launched a devastating war in Gaza that has killed approximately forty-five thousand people. Around the world, anti-Israel protests erupted, and antisemitism spiked; many Jews faced a fresh reckoning with the relationship between Israel and Jewish identity. It was a time of fear and dread and painful fractures within the Jewish community—it was no longer, as Rabbi Buchdahl had suggested, a moment when Jews widely felt at ease. Yet rabbis from a broad range of Jewish institutions observed something they hadn’t anticipated: a surge of interest in Judaism.

Elliot Cosgrove, a Conservative rabbi and the author of the new book “For Such a Time as This: On Being Jewish Today,” told me that since October 7th he’s seen engagement from “within and beyond the boundaries of the conventional Jewish community” at a level he’s never before witnessed.

This has included increased synagogue membership, expanded enrollment in Hebrew-school programs, full houses at Shabbat services—and oversubscribed courses for people interested in becoming Jewish.

Suddenly, my own halting path to conversion was meeting a larger movement. At Central Synagogue, another rabbi, Lisa Rubin, runs the Center for Exploring Judaism, which educates and guides Jewish-curious newcomers. Since October 7th, the program’s courses have enrolled double the usual number of students and accrued a seven-month waiting list. Rabbi Rubin told me that she has warned potential converts that “this is not a great time to be stepping into Judaism.” Still, as she put it, “They’re running toward the house on fire.”

Judaism is not only a faith but a tribe, a culture, and a life style, and the motivations behind conversion are as varied as Jewishness itself. I spoke to converts who had always suspected that they had Jewish ancestry. Deb Kroll, a woman in her early seventies, grew up in the Bible Belt with parents who became Pentecostal leaders, but when she was a child her Christian grandmother told stories of her family fleeing at night from a county where the Ku Klux Klan was active, soon after the lynching of Leo Frank. Kroll remembers thinking, I’m a little Jewish girl who’s been born into the wrong family.

For most of her life, she didn’t realize that it was even possible to convert to Judaism. Then, in recent years, Kroll said, DNA testing of relatives suggested that she had significant Jewish ancestry on both sides. She was studying in Rubin’s program online from her home, in Georgia, when the events of October 7th occurred. “I thought, Well, I’m not going to stop my Jewish journey out of fear,” she recalled, adding, “I throw in my lot with the Jewish people.”

I would add that this willingness to become Jewish in a time of danger goes back to the Exodus when non-Jews (a mixed multitude) joined those Jews who were leaving Egypt for the desert and then the Land of Israel. According to most Kabbalist (mystics) Rabbis all true converts have Jewish ancestors.

The Kabalistic (mystical) book Sha’ar HaGilgulim written by Rabbi Chaim Vital Calabrese states that when Josef was in charge of distribution of grain, millions of Egyptians converted to the faith of Josef’s father Jacob-Israel. These people, who would come to be called the erev rav (a mixed multitude), lived in Israelite villages and followed Israelite practices. Many Israelite souls were included among these Egyptian people, including – most significantly – the soul of the Messiah (Ben Joseph).

According to Rabbi Isaac Luria, Eliezer, the servant of Abraham was a Canaanite who due to his righteousness, merited to be reincarnated in the days of Moses within the tribe of Yehuda. Eliezer reincarnated as Caleb Ben Yefuneh. His soul later incarnated higher and higher until he became a High Priest (Zecharia, the High Priest) and many centuries later a Master Kabbalist (Rabbi Moshe Cordevero). (See Sha’ar HaPesukim of the Ari’)

Also in Persia, as the Book of Esther recorded: “Many people of other nationalities became Jews because awe of the Jews had seized them.” (Esther 8:17)