People often ask why I converted to Judaism twice – first Conservative, then Orthodox. The short answer usually leads to more questions. The longer answer is a story I’ve been nervous to share.
When you’re converting, it can be hard to tell the difference between “this is unfamiliar” and “something here isn’t right.” You’re learning so much that questioning the people guiding you can feel like questioning your own sincerity.
Looking back at my two conversions, that uncertainty is what stays with me. I’m sharing my story because I wish I’d known that trusting someone’s expertise didn’t have to mean ignoring my own discomfort.
If you’re considering conversion, you deserve information that goes beyond the idealized “it’s always beautiful and perfect” version on Instagram. Get my free Conversion 101 ebook for an honest look at the process and what to know before you begin.
Transcript below.
Transcript:
I converted to Judaism twice.
The first time was the middle-of-the-road denomination conservative, and then almost exactly two years later, I converted Orthodox.
And in the past week, six different people have asked me why I did that. So I’m tired of typing it out, so I figure I should tell it. But it’s shocking.
So I’m pretty nervous about sharing this. I don’t actually like sharing very much about my life if I can avoid it.
And always being nervous about the fallout that can come from telling these kinds of stories. Because they’re not just my stories. There are other people involved.
Well, the short answer is that I originally wanted to convert Orthodox. I decided I couldn’t do it. It felt impossible.
So then I decided to try the conservative movement. And during the day of my conservative conversion, so many things went horribly wrong that I became convinced that I had made the wrong decision.
So the full story involves seven years, two conversions, some really terrible experiences with rabbis, and a whole lot of questioning my own judgment.
Hi, I’m Kochava. I’m a Jewish convert and I’ve been helping people who are converting through my blog, Building a Jewish Life dot com since 2010.
I help people because I don’t want anyone to ever go through what I went through.
If you like this raw and honest approach to Jewish conversion, you should probably grab my [free] Conversion 101 ebook down in the description below.
It’s the things they’re not gonna tell you in your Intro to Judaism class.
So let’s start at the beginning. Now I’ve got two quick disclaimers. I’m a lawyer. How can I not have disclaimers?
First, this is the story of why I made the decisions that I made. It’s not advice about which Jewish movement you should convert through. And it’s not a judgment on anyone else’s conversion.
Second, the main theme of our YouTube channel here is that Jews are human. Rabbis are even more human, and sometimes they’re jerks.
Try not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
If something feels wrong in your conversion, it might be wrong.
But okay, I lied. Third disclaimer, most people will never go through any of the things that I went through. I’ve been helping people convert for 16 years now. In fact, today is literally the birthday of my blog, October 20th.
So I can tell you that most people’s conversions are good, or, “Eh, that was fine.”
But the kind of things that I went through, and much worse, are also not crazy rare. They happen a lot more than you would think, and definitely a lot more than they should.
So I’m gonna link right now up to my red flags video. That kinda goes through some of the most common red flags that you can experience in a conversion. But it’s not just for conversions, ’cause conversion story videos tend to go relatively viral, which is not what I’m looking forward to.
But a lot of you who are watching this probably have nothing to do with conversion and just kinda interested in a racy story.
The red flags video is still good for you because it’s the abuses of power you can see in any spiritual mentorship. Rabbis, pastors, anyone who is in a religious power of authority over you. So it’s always good to know what signs to look for.
Our story begins when I was 19, around 2003, 2004.
I started dating a nice Jewish boy, as you do. And he joked that I needed to convert to have his babies. So I started looking into it.
I was raised in an atheist family in the Bible Belt, which is its own kind of religious trauma, let me tell you.
And I had spent years searching for, uh, the right religious tradition for myself. In fact, I got the internet in the sixth grade, and the very first search that I did was I went to Yahoo back when Yahoo wasn’t a search engine, It was a list of subjects. And you could drill down within the subjects to a list of links.
That is how old I am. And I spent the very first search that I did was for religions. So clearly I was fated to be in this kind of work.
But somehow in all of that research, I never knew that you could become Jewish. I even knew that there was at least one Jewish person at my school, um, but somehow the Jewish people still didn’t seem like a real thing to me. I don’t know how both of those things were true at the same time, but they were.
So I started researching and I liked it. Rather than going to a synagogue, um, I went to the Jewish Student Union at my college. And I made two girlfriends who took me to shul.
They took me to the Orthodox shul. They weren’t Orthodox. It probably just had to do with the fact that the rabbi was young and dynamic. I kind of figured that out for myself when I tried later going to the Reform synagogue, and that rabbi was scary as hell.
Just started screaming at someone for wearing a yarmulke in the middle of the service. And I was like, “Okay, I don’t know about this Reform thing, but I don’t like it.” As a footnote, the Reform movement is no longer like that. That’s classical Reform. And in fact, I hear that the current rabbi there is incredible.
Now, the conservative synagogue was out in the suburbs, and I didn’t have consistent access to a car, whereas the Orthodox synagogue was a couple of blocks away from my house. So I started going, and I liked it. I’ll link up here to, uh, the short that I made about the thing that I saw on my very first visit that made me feel like this was the place for me.
Like many Orthodox synagogues in the United States, the congregation was small and elderly. Most of the time when I went to synagogue, it was me and about 15 men over their 70s. They were great, though. I’m really thankful for how kind they were to me. And also extremely funny.
But there was a problem with becoming Orthodox at this stage. Because of the demographics of the shul, I really didn’t see people like myself, so I couldn’t wrap my head around what does a young, single Orthodox life look like?
You know, this is the early 2000s. We don’t have YouTube videos and Instagram and TikTok. I didn’t know what any of this looked like. I was guessing based on what I was reading in books that were often published in the ’80s.
So I loved everything that I was learning. And in fact, enjoying Gemara class is the whole reason why I went to law school. Law was never on my radar. But the rabbi was like, “You seem to really like this and be kind of good at it, so have you ever considered law school?”
And what do you know? He was right. It was the perfect place for me.
But every time things started to get a little real, I would get overwhelmed and kind of freak out, and I would pull back. So I was in this couple of years cycle of being really involved for a few months, and then pulling back for a few months ’cause I didn’t know whether I really wanted it or if it was even possible for me.
But I couldn’t stay away, so then I would go back, and I just kept repeating this, like, forward and back cycle.
Which I’m sure taught my rabbi that college students are extremely flaky. I don’t think in retrospect that I should qualify as flaky, but it certainly looked flaky.
So after college, I decided to kind of just walk away from this Judaism thing. And I talked about that some there in this video that I’ll link up here and down below. I wanted to see if I could live without Judaism, and it was a tremendous failure. Just like all the other times, I just kept getting pulled back.
Couldn’t let it go.
But I knew Orthodoxy wasn’t for me, and I knew that I was really turned off from Reform, so I was like, “I guess I’ll try the Conservative movement.” And I did.
And it was fine. They were really nice.
I attended every day. Again, me with a bunch of people over their 70s, but this time with a few women.
So we reached the point where I was approved to go through the conservative conversion.
And this is where things go off the rails.
So my rabbi, who is great, his mother became ill in Israel and he had to suddenly fly out. But he was like, “Don’t worry, I have a colleague who, uh, lives a few hours away. He’s gonna drive in and do the beit din for you.”
The beit din is the rabbinical court that you go through. It’s kind of like an oral exam about your Jewish life, and then they either approve you or not for the conversion.
Afterwards, you go to what’s called a mikveh, a ritual bath, to do an immersion that finalizes the conversion, which boy, will you be surprised what happens there.
But let’s get back to where we were in the story.
So then the rabbi tells me ” he’s Reconstructionist, but don’t worry, he has Conservative smicha.” Smicha is the word for ordination.
So this is the point where I started to freak out, because I only knew a little bit about the Reconstructionist movement at the time, but I knew it was theologically extremely different from the conservative movement, and considered more liberal than reform.
So I was very concerned: would any other conservative rabbi really accept this conversion?
Because different Jewish movements have different standards for conversion. And so I was worried that my conversion might not be recognized as valid by the synagogues that I would want to attend.
Because kind of along the same lines, my conservative rabbi had Orthodox smicha, but would people let him sit on an Orthodox beit din for conversion? Probably not. So I was already starting to freak out a little. If you’ve been around here, you know I’m an anxious girl.
But sometimes it’s totally legit.
So the day comes, and I go into the meeting, and right away the vibes are off. I do not like this guy one bit. He rubs me the wrong way. I feel like things are bad.
And it pretty quickly goes downhill.
He kind of reiterates that warning at the beginning saying, you know, ” I’m a Reconstructionist rabbi, but I have Conservative smicha, and don’t worry, I’m putting on my Conservative hat today.” Which is what he said.
And so he said that he would judge me according to conservative procedures for conversion. So this is where we run into a problem.
I mentioned it in that movements video that I, uh, linked earlier, but nowadays, at least in the United States, there are two types of conservative synagogues as a general rule. There are ones that practice what the conservative movement says on paper, which is full Jewish observance under Jewish law, very similar looking to what modern orthodoxy would be, just egalitarian.
The reality of most conservative synagogues in the United States is that they are indistinguishable from reform synagogues. The people are generally not observant at all.
So I knew that I was more observant than just about everyone at the synagogue. And in fact, I had dealt with some defensiveness from people who felt like me mentioning mitzvot that I was doing was somehow judging them for not doing the same.
And I find that that’s one of the biggest struggles that non-Orthodox converts face: other people can take your observance quite personally.
So I specifically remember one question where everything changed. He asked me if I was lighting candles for Shabbat. We light candles to start the Sabbath each week. I answered that I light candles most weeks, and sometimes I even do it before candle lighting.
and he was like, “You can’t do that anymore. You need to be lighting it every week, And you need to light it at the right time.” And I was like, “Oh, crap. What am I agreeing to now?” And it just kind of continued from there. And so by the end of this beit din meeting, I believed that I was agreeing to uphold basically a Modern Orthodox level of observance.
Of course, my life looked nothing like that at that point, so I don’t know why he would’ve approved me anyway, but he did. And I had been working towards this conversion for, like, five years at this point. So I was like, “I have a beit din here. I want to be converted. I want this to be done.” So I was like, “I guess that I am just observant now.”
And apparently my panic was visible, because the beit din commented on the fact that my face was so pale. Like, all the blood was gone.
So sitting outside this meeting room was my boyfriend.
Let me tell you, the traditional advice, and my advice, is don’t date during conversion unless you are already in a relationship when you enter the conversion process. It just almost never works out well. I tried it multiple times. It’s just bad. It just never works. I’ve seen it happen again and again and again over the years.
But hormones are hormones, and biological clocks are biological clocks, and the Jewish community puts a lot of pressure on making a family.
‘ Cause you know, I’m in my mid-20s at this point.
But here’s the thing. My boyfriend was great, but I didn’t want him involved in my conversion at all. There is so much stigma about the idea of converting for a romantic partner. And so I wanted this kind of like firewall between my conversion day and my boyfriend. But someone on the beit din, not entirely sure who, invited him to come along for everything.
And like, I can’t say, “No, don’t come. No, I don’t want you there.” Which had nothing to do with him. He’s great.
But this was mine, and I really strongly wanted it to be mine alone. And I felt like
If… I don’t even know how to describe it. It made it feel like cheaper or something. Um Honestly, that’s probably a completely unreasonable feeling, but it’s still the feeling I had.
So then we all travel to the mikvah, which is in a house.
The mikvah itself, and I’ll link down in the description below to a tour of a mikvah so that you can see what it looks like. It’s kind of like a very large jacuzzi size, but deeper. And thankfully, the water is almost always heated. They’re very nice here in America.
But there’s no soap in the mikvah. It’s not a cleaning bath or immersion. You’re supposed to be already fully clean before you do the spiritual immersion.
So at a mikvah, there are multiple bathrooms so that multiple people can be getting ready at the same time for its normal use in, um, having to do with the menstrual cycle.
And so I knew a little bit about preparing for the mikvah because I’d read about it in books. Again, this is 2010, but it’s still pretty early in the Jewish internet.
So I still had a lot of questions about what was gonna happen and wasn’t entirely sure, and it was really kind of scary ’cause you’re like, “I’m getting naked and these people will see my head and hopefully not the rest of me.”
It’s not always done naked now. Thanks, Me Too. Um, but that’s a whole different story.
To prepare for the mikveh, you take a shower or a bath. You do things like cut your nails, clean under your nails, remove any nail polish, uh, remove your jewelry. There’s a whole like checklist.
Because the idea is you want there to be nothing between your skin and the water.
So one of the things you have at the mikvah is a mikvah attendant. It’s a person who helps you and, uh, if you have any needs or, um, they can, but do not have to, uh, can check your body for any, like, stray things. For instance, checking your back for any stray hairs.
So I don’t remember if I was the one who asked or someone else was, but, um, I loved the woman who was going to be my mikvah attendant.
She was at least 75, 4’10”, and an absolute spitfire. She was a lot of fun.
But the rabbi is like, “Hey, here’s the bathroom.” And then he tells her to go into the bathroom with me.
And I’m like, “That doesn’t seem right.” But I don’t say anything because he said it like it was perfectly normal. She walked right into the bathroom like it was perfectly normal.
“I guess this is just something I don’t understand.” Because that is the story of my conversion, is all of these bad things happened to me, and every time I blamed myself.
I was like, “I must not understand. I’m misinterpreting it.”
Like, I had zero trust in myself.
And then so that woman sat there the whole time that I got ready, just sitting in a folding chair in the corner of the bathroom, talking on the phone the entire time, making phone call after phone call, while I’m naked and walking around in this bathroom getting ready.
Like I fully believe that this whole situation qualifies as sexual harassment. Even though no one seemed to have been, like, sexually interested in this, there’s just so much wrong here.
But we do the mikvah. Get it over with. I am now Jewish.
I am still pale. I’m still freaking out.
Because as each of these horrible things happen again and again and again, I become convinced that I have made the wrong choice.
Bad thing, bad thing, bad thing. “Oh, shit, what have I done?”
It felt like G-d was hitting me over the head with a hammer that I had made a mistake and that I should have been Orthodox, and how did I end up here?
And I’m not particularly proud of what happened after that.
I was pretty devastated by what happened, and my life was turned completely upside down.
I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know what I was going to do. Um, ended the relationship with my boyfriend while I was still trying to work three jobs and be a full-time law student. Like, I’m pretty sure I never went back to the conservative synagogue. I certainly don’t have any memories of ever speaking to my rabbi again. I didn’t even know what I would say, and it was just easier to stay away from the place that had made me feel
That it felt like my life was ruined in a way.
I feel like I’ve made a vow to G-d that I don’t know if I can fulfill. And from that day forward, I was converting Orthodox. And to the best of my ability, I was living Orthodox.
Which was not pretty, let me tell you.
Of course, this was all before places like my blog existed. It wasn’t until October of that year, in 2010, that I started my blog to gather up all these answers and unwritten rules and, and all this various information about conversion that you just couldn’t find elsewhere.
So instead of feeling relieved and joyful, I was overwhelmed and panicking.
I didn’t know what to think about any of the crazy things that had happened that day or what they meant for my future. And I certainly didn’t understand what it meant I had agreed to.
I wish I had handled it differently, in a more emotionally mature way, but I didn’t.
I wasn’t converting Orthodox because someone had convinced me that I wasn’t “Jewish enough,” which is what a lot of people’s reasons are for a second conversion.
I was converting because I genuinely believed that Orthodox Judaism was where I was supposed to be and where G-d wanted me to be.
But the process was incredibly difficult.
And I made a video, uh, that I’ll link up there and down below about what is good difficult and what is “oh no” difficult.
Personally, I experienced bullying, hostility, and even sexual harassment from the rabbis who were supposed to be guiding me.
So I had had this life-changing moment of “G-d needs me to be Orthodox.” But every step I take on the Orthodox path is met with pain and humiliation.
And at some point, I developed this attitude of, “Oh, you think I can’t? You just watch me.”
I developed this fierce determination that they were not gonna turn me away from what I felt was right.
Because remember our rule: some people are jerks.
And despite being kicked out of an Orthodox beit din… that’s another story for another day… I was converted by one of the most highly respected Orthodox rabbinic organizations in the world.
Because I don’t let jerks stop me.
They were wrong.
They hurt people. I personally know that they have hurt many more people than me. At least one of them is still doing conversions today, despite me reporting sexual harassment over and over again.
To be fair, I think he’s probably not a serial sexual harasser. I think it was weird circumstances, but he’s definitely a bully and a really big jerk.
I continue picking up the pieces of the people he has hurt year after year after year.
Which if you wanna learn more about that sort of attitude in conversion, that “if you’re suffering, it must be really good,” I’ll link to that up there and down in the comments below. At this point, I have to be running out of YouTube cards. I can only link like five videos, so if I’ve run out of cards at this point, they’ll just all be down in the description below.
But my story has a happy ending. My final beit din was fantastic. I recommend them all the time to people.
I think there are genuinely good people trying to do a good job and mostly pulling it off.
And I was genuinely happy to finish my Orthodox conversion. And I was proud that I had persevered through so many horrible things. And completely flipped my life upside down, lost thousands of dollars, lost my job, all sorts of terrible things.
So I was also carrying a whole lot of pain for what it took me to get there. And I can’t lie, I still carry it today, despite my therapist’s best efforts.
So when I came out of the mikvah, it wasn’t a huge spiritual transformation moment. And I find that’s actually not that uncommon. About half of people, in my experience, feel like it’s a really moving, meaningful moment.
But for me, I was so happy to be done, and I was surrounded by friends who took me out to lunch right after. I was happy and I was relieved.
It’s now been a long time since that all happened, and I’ve had a lot of years to reflect on it.
There’s a lot I probably would have done differently, which is kind of a lot of the stuff that I teach here. I teach you to avoid the mistakes that I made. Um, I’m really good at doing that ‘ cause I make a lot of mistakes.
These experiences are why I am so passionate about helping people who are converting. We’re often dealing with such a power dynamic that can leave us vulnerable.
And jerks are drawn to vulnerable people.
I do think there is a higher percentage of jerk rabbis in the conversion world than in the rabbinic world as a whole, because I believe we are seen as easy prey. We’re “not Jewish,” and so why would the community believe us if we accused someone of something?
We’re easy pickings.
Thankfully, my case wasn’t actually that horrible, all things considered. It could’ve been a whole lot worse. But it was still enough to kind of ruin my life. Twice.
And I guess that’s quite a point to end on.
Here’s hoping that all of you conversion candidates will have positive, wonderful experiences and never experience any of these things. But there is my story.
If you wanna learn more about how the conversion process is supposed to look, check out this video.
