If you’re converting to Judaism, you’ve probably wondered: Once I convert, am I Jewish forever? Can a rabbi take away my conversion?
It’s a question that comes up surprisingly often, and the answer is a little more nuanced than a simple yes or no. In this video, we’ll talk about what Jewish law says about the permanence of conversion, the difference between a conversion that is revoked and one that is found to have been invalid from the beginning, and why stories about challenged conversions are much rarer than the internet might make them seem.
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Transcript below.
Transcript:
 If you convert to Judaism and then later change your mind, are you still Jewish?
Can a rabbi undo your conversion? Can a Beit Din revoke it? Or are you Jewish forever?
The answer is more complicated than most people realize. This is a question that I get a lot, but it’s really three different questions all dressed up in a trench coat. So let’s separate them.
Is conversion permanent? Generally, yes. A valid Jewish conversion is not like a membership you can cancel. Even if later they become non-observant or convert to an entirely different religion, Jewish law, Halacha, still regards them as Jewish.
A born Jew also can’t stop being Jewish, even if it’s a label they would reject for themselves. No matter what they do, they’re still part of the family.
But within that answer, there is a small problem: with a “valid conversion.” What makes a conversion invalid?
That brings us to question number two. What about revoked conversions? Maybe you remember back in 2008 in Israel, there was a big problem with thousands of conversions being invalidated.
Usually, in most cases, they aren’t actually revoking the conversion. They’re not saying, “This is a valid conversion and we’re taking it back.”
What they’re actually saying is that it was never valid to begin with. It’s kind of similar to annulment. And if I recall correctly, back in the 2008 case, it had to do with one of the rabbis overseeing the conversions on the Beit Din.
Something was up with him doing shady things, or else he got on the wrong side of someone else.
The point was he was discredited, and that flowed down to all the people that he had converted during the times that they alleged things happened that were wrong, and that he was signing these Beit Din certificates as an invalid person to sign it. Therefore, the certificate was invalid.
To their credit, I believe they did try to work with all these people to get their conversions back in order.
But that sucks, right? No one wants to live that, and that is why people are very careful about who they put on a Beit Din, because you want to avoid it being retroactively invalidated.
But as is the theme of our YouTube channel here, Jews are human, and rabbis are even more human.
Sometimes they are jerks. Sometimes they do shady stuff and get caught. We cannot protect against every instance of that.
It’s an unfortunate flaw in the system that we have to do the best we can with it when it comes up. So as a convert, you live with some low-level knowledge that someone could come along and revoke your conversion or try to revoke your conversion because they have a beef with a rabbi on your Beit Din.
Rabbis are not immune to rabbinic politics. There is sometimes some shady stuff that goes on between rabbis, and that’s just what it eventually ends up in the newspapers.
But be comforted that the odds are very, very far against this ever being an issue for you. Odds are good you will live your entire life with no one challenging your conversion.
But do always remember it’s possible so that you aren’t, like, completely unmoored if it does happen to you, because Judaism is made up of people.
Now let’s talk about when revocation is personal, when it is about you.
If someone gets a bee in their bonnet about you and decides to challenge your conversion, they could say that you never truly accepted Judaism and the mitzvot as your denomination determines it, or more commonly, that you hid facts that would have changed the outcome of it, that you lied about something.
Let’s be clear. Most of the times, people don’t have a leg to stand on when they make these arguments. For instance, they might wanna make the argument that you didn’t disclose your neurodiversity or mental health challenges or physical disabilities. That doesn’t actually change the calculus of a conversion, but they can make the argument that it does, because just like in a secular court of law, people can sue over anything they want.
The question is, does the judge let it move forward, or do they kick it out?
The other most commonplace you’ll see questioning whether information was revealed is if you’re in a partnership with someone. You have a boyfriend, a girlfriend.
And just because one rabbi invalidates your conversion, does that mean it’s invalidated for everyone else?
No. They would have to decide whether they accept the invalidation or not. Do they accept the conversion or do they accept the invalidation?
At that point, it becomes a lifelong game of “he said, she said,” as people decide which side they’re gonna side with. Not fun, but vanishingly rare.
I do not share these things to scare you, but to make sure that you understand all the options on the table, and quite frankly, so that you’re not surprised when people do bad stuff in Judaism.
One of the biggest causes of converts leaving Judaism is disillusionment. They put the Jewish people, and especially rabbis, up on a pedestal, and then they get disillusioned when the pedestal gets knocked down. Someone gets arrested, someone gets accused of sexual assault, someone embezzles. All these sorts of things that are unfortunately the realities of humans living a human life.
People make bad choices, and some people are jerks, and that’s true with Jews as with any other group. So I know that not everyone agrees with me sharing the dirty laundry here on the internet, but I think it’s vitally important for people who are converting to not put people up on a pedestal in the first place.
Judaism has amazing tools in the Torah and the mitzvot to help you be your best self and have the best relationship with Hashem. But the people are not perfect yet.
I mean, have you read the Torah? The Jewish people see open miracles and then later whine about stuff. Like, not a lot’s changed to this day.
So there is kind of, for lack of a better term, a sliding scale of risk for whose conversion might be invalidated. Like I said, it’s vanishingly small for the average person, not counting that one wild thing in 2008.
But it’s pretty much unheard of in the Reform world.
It’s pretty unheard of in the Conservative world.
It is almost entirely in the Orthodox world, and the chances get higher the more to the right you go. The more stringent groups are, the more they judge the groups that don’t do it the same way they do. That’s just humans being human again.
But the Orthodox conversion world has put in a practice to try to stem these issues, and honestly, I don’t really understand the point of it.
There is sort of a probationary period after your Orthodox conversion in many courts nowadays. This happened to me. You have your conversion, but they hold onto your paperwork for a year before they’ll give you the paperwork that you can actually use to prove to people that you’re Jewish.
If, in that year, you need to prove your Jewish status for something, they will have to directly contact the Beit Din for it.
The idea is that by making sure that you’re observant for a full year, they can be much more certain that no one’s going to question your conversion. But, like, that’s a problem with the system, not with the converts, and it’s the converts who are bearing the pain of that.
And sure, their argument is, “Oh, it’s not such a big deal,” but, like, if you didn’t really have faith that this candidate was valid, why’d you approve him in the first place?
Why are we giving in to the ridiculous games of power-hungry madmen who play games with people’s lives? We need to do a better job of shutting down people who are acting ridiculously. But that is my soapbox.
Obviously, I am not as learned as these rabbis. I assume they have good reason, but for me, on the outside looking in, I really hate it, and I really feel like we could do this in a better way. Without treating the converts like they’re the enemy. That they need to be, like, suspicious of them.
It’s not a nice feeling. You already feel like you are under a microscope the entire time when you’re converting in an Orthodox setting. You worry that every action and every decision can be looked at and judged by the people around you, and it could completely ruin your life if you do the wrong thing and make a mistake.
And you think that ends when you convert. You think it’ll finally be over. You’ll finally be able to live your life.
But instead, you get to spend another year of living under a microscope and fearing that any wrong mistake that you make will somehow completely undo your life.
And during that year, maybe you get married.
Like, I got married the first year that I was converted, and because I know you’re gonna be nosy and wanna know the answers, I didn’t meet my husband until after I finished my conversion. We just had a very short engagement and dating period, about eight months. Still married today.
Um, like- What if I married my husband and at the end of the year they were like, “You know what? You made some mistake and we’re not gonna give you those papers.”
Like, what? No one wants to live that way. Like a sword of Damocles is just hanging over your head for another year of your life when you’ve spent at least a year, probably at least two years, with it already hanging over your head.
Now let’s add another one, all because some people can’t act like grownups.
We need rabbis to stand up to other rabbis who act ridiculous rather than taking it out on the people who are being victimized.
And quite honestly, this video is a pretty Debbie Downer, so I don’t even know what video to refer you to next. Like, I can’t be like, “If you’re still considering converting, come see the Ultimate Guide to Jewish Conversion Step by Step.”
That doesn’t sound so appealing right now.
I know what I’ll do. I will refer you to my video about red flags in the conversion process. Go watch that to find out when things are wrong so that you can stop questioning yourself and saying, “Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I just don’t understand.”