The complex, secret path to becoming an Orthodox Jew

Jewish Journal: Esther lives in the Pico-Robertson area with her Israeli-born husband and three children. She wears long skirts, speaks fluent Hebrew and has mastered the use of a fedora as a head covering when she goes to synagogue.
But in 2005, she was a prospective convert looking for answers. She and her husband, whom she’d already legally married, had been sleeping for months in separate bedrooms of their West Hollywood apartment. A rotating shomer, or guard, drawn from among a group of friends who volunteered to sleep on their couch, made sure they adhered to the separation mandated by the strict process of Orthodox conversion.
At some point, it began to dawn on the couple that to get a marriage certificate in Israel — which is what they wanted — the rabbi supervising Esther’s conversion, Zvi Block of Beis Midrash Toras HaShem, might not cut it for the Rabbinate, whose standards they were having trouble discerning.
They’d heard of other rabbis who claimed they could vouch for her Jewish status, but weren’t sure who to trust.
“There was a lot of weird alternatives that we could have gone through,” Esther, who also asked that her real name not be used to protect her privacy, told the Journal. “But it just didn’t sound right, and it didn’t sound legit. We wanted to make sure the way that we did it is totally legit, because it’s going to affect our kids. I want my kids to be able to marry whoever they want to marry.”
After she immersed herself in the mikveh, or ritual bath, she considered herself a Jew and thus bound by the modesty code of shomer negiah not to touch any man who was not her husband by Jewish law — including the man to whom she was civilly married.
“All of a sudden, that momentum crashed to a halt,” she said of the spiritual journey that had been accelerating through the process of finding a congregation and adopting Jewish customs.
She and her husband had arrived at a frustrating sort of nuptial limbo: They wanted badly to marry under Jewish law in Israel, but couldn’t get a clear answer on whether their conversion would be accepted. But as it happened, a cousin of her husband’s friend worked in a regional branch of the Rabbinate and was able to help.
He faxed them a list of names in Hebrew and English. He told them the list was a secret, for their eyes only, and if anybody asked, it didn’t come from him.
“ ‘Nobody knows this, but this is a list of the rabbis the Rabbinate recognizes to do conversion in the United States,’ ” Esther said the bureaucrat told them.
Sitting at her dining room table with a blue folder in front of her that contains documents related to her conversion, Esther pulled out four pages she said the man faxed her with the names, addresses and telephone numbers of a list of U.S. rabbis.
Their suspicions were confirmed: Block, their L.A. rabbi, was not on the list.
A few months later, Esther and her husband were on a plane to Monsey, a hamlet in upstate New York with a large Chasidic population, where a local rabbinical court performed her conversion. Shortly after, the two were married in Israel.