This wasn’t easy to make.
I’ve been part of the Jewish community for years now, but there are some things I still carry quietly. One of them is how vulnerable conversion candidates can be – and how rarely we talk about it.
Sexual harassment and abuse do happen during the Jewish conversion process. Sometimes it’s a rabbi. Sometimes it’s a community member. Always, there’s a devastating power imbalance and an unspoken pressure not to make waves.
In this video, I speak plainly about what I’ve seen, what I’ve experienced, and what I wish every conversion candidate knew from the beginning. I cover red flags, power dynamics, practical ways to protect yourself, and why your gut matters.
This video is not meant to scare you. It’s here to protect you.
If you’re going through the conversion process, or walking alongside someone who is, I hope this helps you feel more prepared, more aware, and less alone.
🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube
Please take care of yourself while watching.
☎️ If you or someone else need support, contact the following organizations: (not affiliated)
The Hotline – the National Domestic Violence Hotline (US)
Shalom Task Force – Support for abuse survivors in Jewish communities
📌 If you’re currently in the conversion process, consider bookmarking this or sharing it with someone you trust. You might not need it now – but one day, it could help you recognize something you otherwise would’ve explained away.
You’re not imagining things. You’re not too sensitive. And you’re not alone.
Transcript below.
Transcript:
Sexual harassment and assault do happen during the Jewish conversion process. Learn how best to spot it and protect yourself.
It is remarkable how difficult this is for me to talk about. I still have so much PTSD around this topic.
The conversion process is full of humans. And let’s face it, humans do terrible things sometimes.
Sexual harassment or assault can be done to anyone, by anyone, regardless of the genders involved.
In most cases, it’s women being harmed by men, especially in the Orthodox Jewish situations. But don’t let that stop you from believing someone else’s story because it doesn’t fit that narrative. The narrative does not describe every case that exists, and you would be shocked to find out some of the things that have happened in this world.
Why are conversion candidates so vulnerable to sexual harassment and abuse? One, because we’re not Jewish, we are often new to the community, and we have few or no allies in the community.
And we probably don’t have any allies in the broader Jewish world outside the community.
Jewish geography is power in our community. At its base, that’s what a macher is, who you know and who you can get to do a favor for you.
The conversion process itself is so imbalanced in power. Rabbis are literal gatekeepers. If they say no, you’re done.
You make one rabbi mad, and he can literally shut off every possibility you have of converting. And even if he’s not the one in charge of it, he can shut it off with one phone call or one email to the right person. And he knows the right person. You don’t.
They hold your future in their hands, quite literally. If you are in the conversion process, you already know this. But for those of you who are not in the conversion process, this is to tell you that yes, they control where you live, where you’re working, when you can move, when you date. They control your life basically for several years.
Everything you’ve worked for, sometimes for years, can be destroyed with one phone call or email.
Especially in the Orthodox world where conversion has become so centralized. The system currently under the RCA is a monopoly system where one beit din is controlling a large geographic area. If you make someone mad in that office, you cannot convert for several states. You may have to move across the country in order to be able to try to restart the conversion process.
Ask me how I know.
Thankfully I had the opportunity to prove my innocence. Not many people are that lucky. Quite frankly, I’m the only person I know of that has been that lucky.
Thanks to the internet and blogging, I had a small army of rabbis and Jewish lay people who I had been building relationships with, and they went to bat for me. They had no reason to have to go to bat for me, but they did, and I am here and Jewish because of that.
People who want to abuse other people can see these weaknesses in the system. They exploit these weaknesses.
And do you know how many consequences I have seen for them? I’ve seen one, folks, one, and that was because the police got involved. Anything that stays below “call the cops” you’re probably gonna get away with it because who are you? You’re not even Jewish. Why should they believe you?
Let’s talk about those things you might overlook or assume that you must have misunderstood.
If you’re normal, you’ve probably put your rabbis and other mentors up on a pedestal. You want to believe they can do no wrong,
and so you’re gonna talk yourself out of it if you think that you find something suspicious. No, they didn’t really mean it that way. No, that was an accident.
Worse. It’s not always a rabbi or a mentor. It can be someone just in the community.
And if that community member has more power than you do, if they are a major donor or a machar, someone who’s very influential. Who’s your rabbi going to believe? It’s probably not gonna be you.
Emotional abuse, financial abuse. It’s all abuse and it all comes from the same desire to control.
So how can you recognize sexual harassment and better yet, how can you protect yourself?
The first rule of “is this sexual harassment” is to trust your gut.
If someone is creeping you out or making you feel uncomfortable, there’s probably a very good reason why. Your body will tell you.
I’m gonna start with how you protect yourself because quite frankly, you might not be able to. It is very common for people to get away with this stuff.
There may very well be nothing you can do if you still wanna convert.
This is the reality that conversion candidates deal with.
This is the reality I myself dealt with.
Really the best thing you can do is document everything, write it down, pull up Google Drive, make yourself a spreadsheet,
add some columns for date, time, location, who was present, and what happened.
You may never need that list, but if you ever do, it’s worth its weight in gold.
And start tracking before you think you need it. Don’t wait for it to pass some arbitrary point of no return before you start writing down the weird stuff. Abusers start low and ratchet it up. Track as soon as you are feeling weird stuff consistently.
So what does sexual harassment actually look like? Basic safety rules apply. If your boss did this, would you be weirded out? Would he be the creepy boss? Because that’s what rabbis and mentors are to you. They’re your bosses and they have the power to fire you, meaning kick you out of the conversion process if they don’t like what you do.
“Would this be okay in an office?” That is your measuring stick. If not, it’s not okay in a conversion.
Keep your ears open for the whisper network. People who do not have the power to bring consequences on people who hurt them whisper. They will tell when they are safe to do so. They will try to prevent other people from getting hurt. If you hear rumors, don’t believe them automatically, but do file it away.
Keep that in case you need to know that later. If your experiences corroborate that rumor, then you know someone you need to avoid as much as humanly possible, which may not be very possible for you, but you can do your best.
Most obvious kind of sexual harassment is what’s called quid pro quo. “This for that.” It means being asked to trade sexual favors for something you want. In the conversion context, that may be agreeing to convert you. It may mean agreeing to serve as your mentor.
Or make a recommendation or a referral or to hook you up with the people you need.
You would be shocked how many times this comes up, but a rabbi should not ask you out on a date.
Where it gets tricky is if they are asking you to do things that are date-like and you feel that you are not allowed to say no. So if they’re inviting you alone to a dim romantic restaurant for meetings, that’s a red flag. That’s bad. They should not do that.
If for whatever reason this rabbi who is converting you wants to date you, they can do the right thing and they can wait until your conversion is done and you two can interact as peers, as equals.
Also, you would be surprised how often this comes up. A rabbi should never ask you to come to his home alone with no one else there. A lot of rabbis have asked people to go to their home and do filing paperwork and other menial tasks, but sometimes cleaning their house and that’s not okay.
They are asking you to do manual labor in the hopes that you get brownie points towards a faster, smoother conversion. That in itself is abusive, but that is not the type of abuse we are discussing today. But doing it alone in their house, that starts to send off red flags and beebo warning sounds.
Some rabbis have started that way and it’s progressed. Do be very careful if you are being asked to do private personal work for a rabbi.
Red flags.
He may touch you in ways that feel just too friendly and kind of creepy. Especially in the Orthodox context, no rabbi should be touching a woman at all. We have shomer negiah, rules between the genders of not touching each other. If an Orthodox rabbi is hugging you or putting their hand on the small of your back and you’re a female, that is just a bucket of red flags.
I can’t even tell you how many red flags that is.
That is abnormal.
Sometimes this touching is played off as accidental, like maybe they accidentally brush into your breast. Like once is a thing, but like when it’s a pattern, you should be writing it down.
It can also manifest as a near constant intrusion of your personal space. If you cannot get breathing room around your rabbi, that is a control tactic. They are taking up your space.
You should not be getting unwanted texts, phone calls, social media messages, visits from a rabbi.
Same with unwanted gifts. If these things happen in an office and you thought about calling HR about it, then it’s wrong here too.
The relationship between a conversion candidate and a rabbi should be professional and polite. They’re not your friends. Never mistake them for your friends because as we said, they’re the gatekeepers. Their job is to keep you out if you’re not appropriate.
I hate that we have to say this, but rabbis should not be making inappropriate comments in front of you. Definitely not about you.
This is actually the one you’re most likely to see. They should not be making lots of comments about your appearance or the appearance of other people, especially if it’s a man making comments about the bodies of women.
And it doesn’t have to all be positive attention. It can be insults, derogatory comments, negative comments, rude comments, jokes, those can all still be sexual harassment.
So here’s where it gets hairy: pervasive or inappropriate personal questions.
You can argue that there is some need for personal questions during the conversion process, but how much is pervasive? How personal does it have to be to fall into the category of inappropriate?
The lines are very hard to draw here, and it is the exact place where you are going to reason it away.
Even when it is blatantly inappropriate, you will still try to rationalize it away.
In the moment I completely explained away this kind of behavior. It didn’t hit me until later, and a friend was telling me, “dude, this is really not okay,” and I had to hear that from someone else in order to be able to listen to my gut.
There was a reason I left all these meetings with this person crying.
After all, we did everything the “right way.” We were across a table from each other. There was no touching. The door was open. There was a male secretary right outside the door that we could see, and if he looked over, he could see us. But that rabbi sat there and asked me very detailed questions about my sexual history. I cannot think anywhere that would be considered appropriate. Your sexual history should be irrelevant to the conversion process.
In this case, I sat there and I blamed myself.
And guess what? He’s still overseeing conversions. I’ve tried for years to get people in power to care, and let me tell you, they are not interested in doing things that are uncomfortable or that would rock the boat or upset power alliances.
So here’s the summary. Trust your gut. If something feels wrong, it probably is wrong. Don’t twist yourself into pretzels trying to make it all right.
Listen to the whisper networks. You might hear things that are useful to you. And understand that you may not be able to do anything about it if someone is sexually harassing you. Allegedly, there are processes in place to report people who are sexually harassing or otherwise abusing people.
But don’t be surprised if those reporting mechanisms don’t work.
But remember the most important thing of all. Write it down. Keep track even if you are questioning yourself. Like, do whatever you need to to keep track of these things before you need it, because after you need it is too late.
And keep those records, don’t delete them just because you’ve finished the conversion process. Don’t delete old emails. Don’t delete the Google Doc. You never know when you might need it again, because maybe one day we’ll reach the point of the straw that breaks the camel’s back and your evidence will be necessary.
People who abuse others aren’t just doing it to you. They don’t stop at one. It’s a pattern. Pikuach nefesh, y’all.
