{"id":102834,"date":"2016-08-02T13:52:19","date_gmt":"2016-08-02T21:52:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=102834"},"modified":"2016-08-02T13:52:36","modified_gmt":"2016-08-02T21:52:36","slug":"the-complex-secret-path-to-becoming-an-orthodox-jew","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=102834","title":{"rendered":"The complex, secret path to becoming an Orthodox Jew"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jewish Journal<\/a>: 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.
\nBut in 2005, she was a prospective convert looking for answers. She and her husband, whom she\u2019d 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.
\nAt some point, it began to dawn on the couple that to get a marriage certificate in Israel \u2014 which is what they wanted \u2014 the rabbi supervising Esther\u2019s conversion, Zvi Block of Beis Midrash Toras HaShem, might not cut it for the Rabbinate, whose standards they were having trouble discerning.
\nThey\u2019d heard of other rabbis who claimed they could vouch for her Jewish status, but weren\u2019t sure who to trust.
\n\u201cThere was a lot of weird alternatives that we could have gone through,\u201d Esther, who also asked that her real name not be used to protect her privacy, told the Journal. \u201cBut it just didn\u2019t sound right, and it didn\u2019t sound legit. We wanted to make sure the way that we did it is totally legit, because it\u2019s going to affect our kids. I want my kids to be able to marry whoever they want to marry.\u201d
\nAfter 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 \u2014 including the man to whom she was civilly married.
\n\u201cAll of a sudden, that momentum crashed to a halt,\u201d she said of the spiritual journey that had been accelerating through the process of finding a congregation and adopting Jewish customs.
\nShe and her husband had arrived at a frustrating sort of nuptial limbo: They wanted badly to marry under Jewish law in Israel, but couldn\u2019t get a clear answer on whether their conversion would be accepted. But as it happened, a cousin of her husband\u2019s friend worked in a regional branch of the Rabbinate and was able to help.
\nHe 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\u2019t come from him.
\n\u201c \u2018Nobody knows this, but this is a list of the rabbis the Rabbinate recognizes to do conversion in the United States,\u2019 \u201d Esther said the bureaucrat told them.
\nSitting 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.
\nTheir suspicions were confirmed: Block, their L.A. rabbi, was not on the list.
\nA 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[228,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conversion","category-orthodoxy"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=102834"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102834\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102835,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102834\/revisions\/102835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=102834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=102834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=102834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}