UNITED STATES
Forward
July 7, 2015
By Bethany Mandel
Last year I discovered that my rabbi, Barry Freundel, filmed me naked while I was in the mikveh bathroom preparing to convert (during a “practice dunk”) and while converting to Judaism. After outrage and sorrow, I felt fear. Fear for the integrity of my conversion with his name at the top of my documents.
At 2 am several days later I woke up and penned a now infamous blog post on my phone in the dark next to my sleeping husband. When he woke up I told him I would throw it up on the Times of Israel and gave him a basic gist of the contents. It was a Bill of Rights for converts and those would finish the conversion process. He is a fantastic editor, and I normally have him at least proofread what I write, but I didn’t think many would even bother to read this. By the time he got to the office it was on the front page of the Times of Israel, and to date has been shared over 15,000 times on Facebook alone. I didn’t think anything that I had to say was particularly groundbreaking. Most of my close friends knew what I went through in order to convert to Judaism, and I thought that my experience was fairly normal. I discovered afterwards that what converts go through is not well known in the wider Jewish community.
As surprised as I was for that post to go viral, I was equally surprised to hear from Rabbi Mark Dratch, Executive Vice President of the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA). The RCA were putting together a committee to evaluate protocols and best practices for RCA conversions going forward, and he asked me to be a part. By the time I spoke to him I had already regretted writing my piece for the Times of Israel, as I had previously liked to keep my status as a convert as close to the chest as possible. At this point I knew that there was no real going back; when you Googled my name, the first thing that popped up was the Times of Israel piece. When you and put “Bethany Mandel” into Google the first suggested autocomplete is “conversion.” Despite being loathe to be the poster child for conversion, I knew I had an opportunity to help make a difference, to make it better for future converts, and I accepted his offer.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.