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OUTREACH
STORIES
What I Learned About Judaism from My Fiance's Conversion
Good evening and Shabbat Shalom,
I would like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to share some of the
experiences I went through when my fiance, Shanna, recently chose Judaism.
She was raised in a Catholic home and attended Catholic school when she was younger.
She felt increasingly alienated by and at odds with various beliefs associated
with Catholicism and gradually began dissolving her relationship with this religion.
At the same time, through some of her Jewish friends, she occasionally began
attending services and seders and found that many of the central tenets of Judaism
resonated with her. Years later, after we had been dating for a while, and we
had celebrated the Jewish High Holydays with my family, she told me that she
wanted to begin the process of a conversion to Judaism.
We are very grateful that both her and my parents have been extremely supportive
throughout the process. We began looking into different congregations in San
Diego and, after attending an Erev Shabbat service
at Congregation Beth Israel, we felt like we had found a spiritual home. We therefore
began to regularly attend services and enrolled in the year-long Basic Judaism
course together.
I, probably like many, had what I thought to be an exhaustive comprehension of
everything Judaism entails by the time I was bar mitzvah'ed at
13. Since then, I observed the important holidays and interpreted the religion
based on a knowledge base derived from a few years at Hebrew school about 20
years ago. Attending these Basic Judaism classes was therefore a richly rewarding
time in which I relearned, in far greater detail, the origin and significance
of so many of the customs and traditions that I had taken for granted. Some of
these, Shanna and I felt, spoke to us in an important and fundamental way, while
others seemed either dated or even plain wrong. Discussing what many of these
traditions and customs meant to each of us often resulted in long, and sometimes
heated, conversations between us, often lasting long after the end of the classes.
Through this process, culminating in Shanna's examination with the Beit
Dien and immersion in the Mikvah, we both
felt a strong spiritual connection with Judaism and felt very much at home with
Congregation Beth Israel, and the with support and friendship of the clergy.
However, we both appreciate that this is not simply a one-time accomplishment,
but rather an ongoing, lifelong process that we will continue to share and experience
together.
Thank you very much.
KF
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