Actually don't listen to me. I'm an impulse buyer with credit cards. You want a nice looking pitcher and basin to perform the hand washing mitzvot? That's an excellent opportunity to go thrifting! You might even find Judaica there, like a Chanukkiyya perhaps?

You don't want to wait 8 years for Shabbat candles to arrive from Israel? Ask your rabbi! When I asked her if you can reuse a Havdalah candle, she sensed I was worried about the cost of buying all these candles and said her shul has tons of extras.

You absolutely do need a Chumash, a Tanakh, and probably a study Bible too... but Sefaria has all that and more! Especially the Talmud and other Rabbinic sources! It literally blows my mind that this site exists and is free.

But what about all the books on Jewish history and philosophy? What about textbooks for Modern and Biblical Hebrew? See if there are scanned versions online, or go to your local library. Invest in notecards, you're going to want to write down prayers and such, this will especially help if you don't own the books you're studying from.

It's a good idea to have a Siddur, but your shul will most definitely have their own, and as others have told me, you can ask your Rabbi if you can borrow one to take home (make sure to treat it with reverence).

If you want to start baking Challah and are living on your own, or maybe in a dorm room, see if there are community cooking spaces so you don't have to buy your own materials, or just ask your parents if they can gift you some kitchenware because "You want to get into baking."

You literally don't need anything other than a cup that you think is pretty and has meaning to you for the Kiddush. And don't splurge, I've seen hundreds of very attractive Kiddush sets and candle holders and all that for modest prices.

And take it slowly! Don't buy everything at once. We're nowhere near close to Chanukka right now, so don't even put that in your mind. If you want to acquire holiday items, focus on Pesach and worry about other festivals in their due time, let your wallet recover a little. This also goes for Shabbat! You don't need a pristine set of everything all at once, I'm just an idiot. You can slowly build up your perfect beautiful intricate table as the months go by.

This is a hard time for all Jews rn. And I’m so thankful to my synagogue and to jumblr for making me feel less alone. As someone in the process of converting this feels like a really big time to be on such a journey.

Conversion, I would argue, is always a bit lonesome. You might lose all your family, you might not. Even if you don’t, you still say goodbye to all the traditions you grew up with, and even if they didn’t mean much to you, it’s still something that you say goodbye to. There are so many goodbyes in conversion.

And there are so many hellos. New people, new community, new traditions. It’s so exciting and honestly feels like such a balm to my soul. The piece of me that was always missing coming home.

Watching the news, seeing the antisemitism and the divide, it terrifies me. And yet I see all my synagogue keep their heads up and keep going and it brings me so much hope. I see Israelis making matzah after bombings occur and singing Dayenu and I know it would have been enough.

Even for me, even just this, remaining a ger for life, would have been enough.

I need my friends in the Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn to be able to see my posts about gerim and say to themselves "I AM NOT THE INTENDED AUDIENCE, TIME TO MOVE ON"

I will not, I WILL NOT have a stupid little conversation about the validity of your minhagim every time you get butthurt that I posted a meme about me going super Saiyan on people who are anti ger

I honestly find I have found more community with Gerim than I have with born-Jews when it comes to Observant Judaism. Halakhically, I'm a born-Jew, but I have absolutely no family Minhagim to embrace. My mother's father is an asshole, and thus we haven't followed much of his traditions, and my father was raised Christian.

I always felt out-of-place in Jewish day school when my classmates would talk about their giant extended families celebrating Jewish holidays and milestones with them, of little family traditions they practice. Meanwhile, every Seder was always just me, my parents, and my siblings, and maybe my grandparents, if they decided they cared.

It's no wonder then, that so many of my Jewish friend group ended up being Gerim. It wasn't even intentional, but we just found each other. Just a few Jews desperately trying to figure out our places in the Jewish nation.

Gerim have been my first allies, and I will always be an ally to Gerim. To choose to become absorbed into an ancient nation and tribe, to accept all the trials and tribulations that being Jewish brings...... it's such an honorable and awe-inspiring thing.

There's a lot of work the Jewish community needs to do to make Gerim feel more welcome. It's a commandment to love and cherish the convert, but we need to follow this commandment better.

No convert should have to feel like they're out of place, or that they have less of an opportunity when it comes to community, marriage, and family. We need to love the convert even more, and make our centers of education and worship explicitly welcoming to converts.

A person shouldn't have to hide that they're a convert, and a person's identity as a Ger shouldn't be treated as taboo.

Being a Ger is just like being from any other tribe of Israel. Judaism would not be here today if it weren't for converts- Yitro, Tzipporah, Ruth, Onkelos..... foundations that make Judaism what it is today.

When someone joins our family, we cannot forsake them.

So just so you guys know I’m /technically/ halakhically Jewish (my maternal grandmother is a Jewish woman who married a goyish man,  let my grandfather and his relatives raise my mom xtian) and I’m considering conversion bc I never really had a relationship with Judaism growing up 

hey if you're jewish and/or interested in hearing me talk about my conservadox conversion journey you should follow my blog @joy-in-judaism where I document my experience in growing faith and finding community

Just as like, a general note: if you are leaving a messianic background (whether you chose it yourself or not) in order to seek a true connection to Judaism, most rabbis and Jewish communities are going to be thrilled, actually. (And if they're not, they're in the wrong and they should be happy to have you.)

The thing is that while Judaism doesn't proselytize, we DO want klal Yisrael (the whole People Israel) to be Jewish and doing Jewish instead of avodah zarah (foreign worship, idolatry.) Some take that in an unfortunately fundamentalist direction, but most just want to have a strong Jewish community free from predatory missionaries and hucksters and pressure to assimilate.

Really bizarre how often zionist jews will consider zionist gentiles in the process of converting/thinking of converting as already jewish but are skeptical of antizionist gerim… What happened to all that talk about judaism being a closed practice. What happened to not questioning the judaism of gerim.

yarın teknolojinin t sini bile bilmeyerek sisteme cevap kağıdımı yüklemem gerekiyormuş

ALLAH SEN BÜYÜKSÜN

But what to choose, what to CHOOSE 😱

bugün başımızdan geçen bir olayı anlatmak istiyorum.

üniye beden eğitimi dersi konsun

Honestly can I just say: all of y'all who are starting or continuing your conversions right now, even in these terrible times, and experiencing and embracing Jewish joy at a time when it is very hard to be Jewish? You are such a miracle and a blessing. There is a special kind of ahavat Yisrael - love for the Jewish people - that gerim bring to the table, and it's so life-giving always. But especially in dark times. Especially now.

May your light be a blessing on all of us!

"Source: in Jewish circles, we regularly have rousing debates about what a crow would have to do to convert." What are some of the answers?

General consensus is the same things as humans, but instead of mikveh immersion they’d need to come up with a similar thing that safe for their particular species; and instead of a bris, the ceremonial kind converts-with-pre-circumcised-penises do (a small prick of blood in the genital area) if they are comfortable with that slash want to

There are many aspects of Jewish life that would benefit from crow gerim, such as building the sukkah and looking for all the chametz right before Pesach. Plus, having a crow give a D’var torah would be a delight

It's very interesting that anti-Zionists claim to be "anti-colonial" given the arguments I routinely see them use against Jews. For years, I've seen them use full scale blood quantum arguments, for one. Most recently, now that we're fully in "Jesus was a Palestinian" season again, I saw a famous economist claim that "Jesus is genetically closer to Palestinians, (particularly Christians) than to Israelis (0 connection to most groups)," which is false to begin with.

Personally, I'm very sensitive to this kind of argument because I'm a ger. These people go after Jews like us very hard because to them we have the wrong DNA and thus undermine Jewish indigeneity, peoplehood, and history. Even if they concede the genetic evidence of born Jews' ancestral origins, they still point at gerim and any of our descendants as the "fake Jews" who don't belong… anywhere, actually. We don't belong in Israel because we're "foreign interlopers," and we don't belong outside of Israel because we had the gall to become Jews.

It's one type of antisemitism I can't seem to numb myself toward.

Hi Nonnie! Thank you for the ask, and my apologies about how long it's taking me to reply these days. Real life is not currently kind... :(

Okay, I had to roll my eyes so hard at that propaganda lie about Jesus. (found the economist in question, love it when someone who is living as a colonizer on stolen Native American land, has the audacity to goysplain a Jewish man to Jews, who support Jewish native rights. There really is no end to how much Jews just don't count to such people, is there?)

And it really is remarkable how many things he could get wrong in just that one part of his tweet...

Jesus was not a Palestinian, he was a Jew.

If you traveled back in time, and wanted to ask him about being Palestinian, you wouldn't be able to speak to Jesus in Arabic, which is the language of the Palestinians as Arabs, you would have to speak to him in either Hebrew or Aramaic (which is so close to ancient Hebrew, that I can speak some Aramaic simply by virtue of being a native Hebrew speaker) for him to understand you. Because he was a Jew.

If you did speak to Jesus in Hebrew or Aramaic, and asked him about being Palestinian, he wouldn't know what you're talking about, because the Romans would only rename the land Provincia Syria Palaestina in 136 AD, over 100 years after his death. Calling Jesus Palestinian is like saying that Chief Powhatan (probably best known as Pocahontas' father) was a Virginian, just because he was born and lived on territory that would later become Virginia. It's anachronistic, blatantly untrue, and totally imposing colonialist inventions on native people.

To the best of my knowledge NO ONE has dug up Jesus' DNA to compare it to ANY group. This is how you can tell that when he gets to that part, this guy is just blatantly making propaganda up.

Israelis are not one group, but Israeli Jews do test close to other Middle Eastern groups, and closest to other Jewish groups from around the world.

I guess, why settle for one bit of bullshit, when you can go for five?

I find it so interesting that you used the term "blood quantum." For non-Americans, who may not know it, here's a short introduction:

A person's Blood Quantum is the fraction of their ancestors, out of their total ancestors, who are documented as full-blood Native Americans. The blood quantum policy was first implemented by the federal government within tribes to limit native citizenship. However, since 1934, tribes were granted the authority/ability to create their own enrollment qualifications.

I find it interesting, because I keep thinking Jews and First Nations have so much in common, as native peoples. I remember coming across at least two different stories of people being adopted into Native American tribes. Obviously, each first nation has its own rules about it, before and after the colonization of America, but the point is... there is room for someone to become a member of the tribe, not based on blood. Most of the time, membership of the tribe IS based on ancestry, but it isn't limited to that. Some people come and live with the tribe, adopt its customs and way of life, emerge themselves in the values and heritage, embrace its spiritual beliefs, become a member of this community, and then they are adopted in. It's the same with Jews. Most of us are born Jewish, some of us choose to live this lifestyle, embrace the customs, beliefs and culture, go to synagogue, get to know the community, and eventually adopt and are adopted by it. That's the thing. Converting to Judaism isn't just changing your belief system. It's joining a tribe, and changing one's identity through this process of mutual adoption. Converts to Judaism don't take away ANYTHING from the native rights of Jews. On the contrary, this process of conversion is so different to when someone moves from one religion to another (think of how much simpler baptism is, to the long journey of converting to Judaism), precisely because Judaism isn't just a religion, unlike Christianity and Islam. It is an entire, intricate identity that combines multiple aspects, as all ancient, native identities do.

And in this context, think of Americans who are mostly of European descent, and have nothing to do with Native American culture, or way of life, but they can point to having an "exotic" great great great grandfather, who was a Native American chief. From what I've gathered, they would not be considered members of the tribe by most Native American nations. But the person who lives with the tribe, and shares its ways and its fate? That person is recognized as such by the tribe members.

Jews are the same. We are not native just because our ancestors are from Israel. We are also native, because we are the people who have preserved that Israelite identity. We have carried its torch, and passed it on along the generations, and we have shared our light with those, who chose to stand with us, to share our ways, our fate, and the consequences of the horrible hatred aimed at us.

I love you, my fellow tribe member. Thank you for sharing the light, and the burden, together! *sending so much love* xoxox

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)