Lest anyone think that most Jews agree with Rabbi Yitzchak Schochet’s insensitive (and downright nasty) opinion piece in The Jewish Chronicle calling for fellow Orthodox rabbis to stop performing conversions, Miriam Shaviv, the foreign editor at the paper, responds with a piece called “An offensive conversion ‘solution.'” In the piece, she defends converts (and Judaism itself) against what she calls a “global Orthodox conversion system” that is “broken.”
Thank you, Miriam, for giving so many of us converts a voice with your piece. So many converts, including myself, were waiting for Jews-by-birth to respond to this Schochet’s disgusting and incredibly hurtful editorial, an editorial that questions our very right to exist as Jews and extended to the right of our families to exist and be part of the larger Jewish community. I sincerely hope that your editorial will ring louder and truer than Schochet’s, which honestly scared the crap out of many converts I know.
Schochet and some terribly misguided rabbis in Israel should not by no means be interpreted as the voice for all or even most Orthodox Jews, much less Orthodox rabbis…haredi or modern.
Related: “Beth Din rejects rabbis call for end to conversion”
Memoirs of a Jewminicana 
Thank you SO MUCH for getting this editorial out there.
Being a very recent convert myself, I have no words to express how I feel on this issue.
rachel
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See also: Beth Din rejects rabbis call for end to conversion
“The London Beth Din has rejected a call from a senior rabbi for a worldwide halt to conversions.”
Joel Katz
Religion and State in Israel
@religion_state
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Thanks, Joel!
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Aliza, please know that there are indeed “Jews by birth” who are just as horrified by Rabbi Schochet's comments as the converts are. There has to be a way for sincere converts to join the Jewish people without going through hoops that are unnecessary. Any more stringent conditions than are required creates problems for everyone that eventually causes everyone to lose confidence in Judaism's ability to be seen as it truly is.
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