The Kibbitz
Why do you think conversion rates have been increasing? Post-October 7th, there were many people who felt this was their oppor- tunity to identify with Israel, to iden- tify with Judaism. For example, Israelis who come to America often want to set aside their Israeli identity. They meet a non-Jewish American and aren’t particularly interested in whether she converts or not. But after October 7th, all of a sudden, it became important to them to be identified as Jews. I have a number of those couples where one spouse converted and now they’re raising Jewish families, some- times even back in Israel. Pre-COVID, everybody had their rabbi, and if your rabbi didn’t want to do a conversion, you didn’t have many options: Orthodox rabbis are generally reticent to get involved in conversions. But, during COVID, rabbi shopping became more com- mon. People weren’t going to shul What are some of those barriers for Orthodox rabbis? What caused you to make conversions a big focus? You could say the barrier is the tra- dition of pushing the convert away. [Editor’s note: Traditionally, rabbis would reject would-be converts three times, as a way of ensuring that only those who are truly serious about the process undertake it.] But I don’t think that’s the real reason. I think it’s fear. Status is a big deal, and to sud- denly declare someone Jewish was, I think, very frightening for a lot of rab- bis. It was much easier to kick it up- stairs—to send it to the RCA [The Rabbinical Council of America, one of the main governing bodies for Ortho- dox rabbis. In 2008, it launched the A DAM MINTZ is the founder anymore; they didn’t have their rabbi. They could look around. And, sudden- ly, people were finding rabbis outside their own community who were will- ing to do conversions. of Project Ruth, a program that helps people convert to Juda- ism. An Orthodox pulpit rabbi and academic, Mintz leads The Shtiebel, a community and congregation in Manhattan. “Over the past seven or eight years,” he says, “the number of conversions has grown, and then post-COVID and post– October 7th it has really exploded.” Mintz has also written extensively about eruvim , the series of boundary markers that communities erect and maintain to define the borders of carrying on Shabbat, as well as two volumes of the Ortho- dox Forum, a series created to discuss major issues in the Orthodox Jewish community. We spoke about the shifting landscape of conversion within the Jewish community.
Geirus Protocols and Standards pro- gram to centralize Orthodox conver- sions in North America.] The problem is that at some point you’re going to have someone in your shul whom you care about who needs to convert. And all of a sudden kicking it to the RCA won’t be good enough, because them taking two or three years with no call- backs is going to be a real problem when they’re members of your con- gregation. I’ve had many rabbis call me in exactly those situations. I have noticed anecdotally that when someone Haredi has a child marry- ing someone who isn’t Jewish, the process for conversion seems to get expedited. That’s the Ivanka [Trump] case — that’s certainly true. You bring up an inter- esting point about who and when and what gets expedited. There’s a big fear in the Haredi com- munity of false negatives—of con- verting someone who isn’t sincere, who might have issues with their conversion later. What’s the cost of that model? You can’t convert everybody who asks. If you convert everybody, you have no standards, and that’s something I grapple with. In the non-Orthodox world, there’s an opinion that basical- ly we should just have an open mikveh day, line everyone up, and make a lot more Jews. I understand that theory: we want more Jews. But you still have to have a process. What I’ve tried to do with Project Ruth is really tighten that process. What happens is: someone calls me and, if you’re interested in joining Project Ruth, you go to the website, click apply, and it automatically sets up a 15-minute interview with me. I know within the first 30 seconds whether this is going to be right or
14 SUMMER 2026
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