Conversion to Judaism provides information, advice, and support for individuals contemplating conversion to Judaism, as well as those who have converted and the families affected by this decision. With sensitivity and compassion, Lawrence J. Epstein offers an informative volume that warmly welcomes the newcomer to Judaism.

Becoming Jewish is an engaging, accessible, all-inclusive step-by-step guide to converting to Judaism that introduces readers to finding life's meaning through the evolving religious civilization that is Judaism. Written with humor and heart, readers learn the ins and outs of becoming Jewish and discover the wonder that is the language, literature, history, rituals, food, music, and culture of contemporary Jewish life.

The Gerus Guide is the only book on the market that provides a step-by-step guide to Orthodox Jewish conversion. Drawing from over 25 years of experience counseling hundreds of candidates through the process, Rabbi Aryeh Moshen lays out a roadmap that's been proven successful time and again. Here, you'll find a comprehensive guide to keeping Kosher and observing the Sabbath, finding your community, Jewish prayer, and everything you need to live as an Orthodox Jew on a daily basis.

In print for over 20 years, Choosing Judaism has become a classic guide for individuals considering conversion. By sharing her own story, Lydia Kukoff creates a remarkable work about what it means to make this significant choice. Years after her own conversion she continues to question, grow, and learn, and encourages others to do the same.

Over the years, Rabbi Bernice Kimel Weiss has shepherded hundreds of non-Jewish students into the family of the Jewish people. For most, the interest in Judaism is sparked by a decision to marry a Jewish man or woman. But that is only the beginning. In the gentle hands of a teacher who has witnessed and understands their turmoil, their conflicts, their tears, they bare their personal struggles. What emerge are amazing, powerful, soul-stirring stories of re-creation - the extraordinary adventure of becoming a Jew at the turn of the 21st century. An Asian-American whose father owns a Japanese restaurant marries a secular Jew but leads him to Orthodox Judaism; a Belgian raised by nuns meets a Jew and finds her faith in Israel; a former Sunday school teacher from a small farm town falls in love with a Jewish girl and with her faith as well; an African-American woman lawyer, a Harvard graduate, discovers Judaism and keeps kosher in a small southern town: their varied stories and eight more are revealed in these pages. The twists and turns and the direction their lives ultimately take are a source of inspiration to those contemplating Judaism, and to all in search of faith. They are a gift to the Jewish people.

In this volume, Moshe Lavee offers an account of crucial internal developments in the rabbinic corpus, and shows how the Babylonian Talmud dramatically challenged and extended the rabbinic model of conversion to Judaism. The history of conversion to Judaism has long fascinated Jews along a broad ideological continuum. This book demonstrates the rabbis in Babylonia further reworked former traditions about conversion in ever more stringent direction, shifting the focus of identity demarcation towards genealogy and bodily perspectives. By applying a reading-strategy that emphasizes late Babylonian literary developments, Lavee sheds critical light on a broader discourse regarding the nature and boundaries of Jewish identity.

Katie's glorious summer at her grandparents' rambling home ends in tragedy when violence wrecks the three-day family reunion.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, some 84,500 Jews in imperial Russia converted to Christianity. Confessions of the Shtetl explores the day-to-day world of these people, including the social, geographic, religious, and economic links among converts, Christians, and Jews. The book narrates converts' tales of love, desperation, and fear, tracing the uneasy contest between religious choice and collective Jewish identity in tsarist Russia. Rather than viewing the shtetl as the foundation myth for modern Jewish nationhood, this work reveals the shtetl's history of conversions and communal engagement with converts, which ultimately yielded a cultural hybridity that both challenged and fueled visions of Jewish separatism. Drawing on extensive research with conversion files in imperial Russian archives, in addition to the mass press, novels, and memoirs, Ellie R. Schainker offers a sociocultural history of religious toleration and Jewish life that sees baptism not as the fundamental departure from Jewishness or the Jewish community, but as a conversion that marked the start of a complicated experiment with new forms of identity and belonging. Ultimately, she argues that the Jewish encounter with imperial Russia did not revolve around coercion and ghettoization but was a genuinely religious drama with a diverse, attractive, and aggressive Christianity.

A beautifully personal and engaging story of the wonders and struggles of life as a "newly" Jewish wife and mother

"This book challenges readers to consider the issues relating to halakhic conversion, and to rethink historic attitudes and policies concerning conversion. Whereas for many centuries conversion to Judaism was relatively rare, in modern times it is a significant phenomenon. This book will enable readers to better understand the phenomenon and to appreciate the need for halakhic conversions."--BOOK JACKET.