The people who are choosing to become Jewish after October 7

When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, Lais Fulgencio was 13 months away from completing her conversion to Orthodox Judaism. Now in her early thirties, Fulgencio, who was born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil but moved to Sydney, Australia in 2023, had been fascinated by the religion since she was 15 years old.

She had a meeting soon after with the Sydney Beth Din and was asked if she wanted to turn back now on her journey. “Antisemitism exists and will continue existing. Are you sure you want to do it?” one rabbi said. Anti-Jewish hatred, she was told, wasn’t from a bygone era. It was happening now – it was evident in the attack itself and the reported 400 per cent surge in US hate crimes in the subsequent two weeks.

But Fulgencio was more resolute than ever. “My answer was, ‘Can I go to the mikvah now? Can I finish this?’”

Lais Fulgencio[Missing Credit]

It is well-documented that following the October 7 attack, antisemitism surged across the globe, but the massacre and all that followed didn’t sway those already embarking on conversion. For some, it motivated them even more. Rabbi Jonathan Romain, former leader of Maidenhead Synagogue and now convenor of the Reform Beit Din, says that 2024 saw an almost 50 per cent increase in UK conversions. He cites two explanations: the rise in DNA testing on websites such as Ancestry allowing people to uncover their Jewish heritage, and the multi-faith syllabus in schools, introducing children to the religion from a young age.

Antisemitism exists and will continue existing. Are you sure you want to do this?

As part of the conversion process, Rabbi Romain warns people that they’ll be opening themselves up to prejudice. “They always say, ‘Yes, yes, we’re very aware of it’, and we say, ‘Yes, but you’re putting yourself on the front line, and not just you, but any future children you have’, and they say ‘Yes, we regret that’s happening, but it doesn’t deter us.’”

He said he’s been surprised by the amount of people who say, “No, it hasn’t affected my decision one little bit.” “I suppose for most people that’s because they feel that the ethics speak to them, the sense of community warms them, and that negates some of the unpleasantness at the moment,” he explains.

The increase in conversions isn’t exclusive to the UK. In America and Israel, Orthodox conversion is also up.

“Since October 7, we have seen much greater interest in conversion among Israeli citizens who made aliyah under the law of return. In some cases, people who had abandoned their conversions for more than a decade returned to us to complete their conversions,” says Rabbi Seth Farber, the founder and director of the Jewish life advocacy organisation ITIM.

In the past year, conversions in his organisation have increased by 30 per cent, and on a national scale, he estimates that numbers have increased from 1,950 in 2023 to 2,900 Orthodox converts in 2024.

Rates of Orthodox conversion in the UK has stayed “steady”, however, according to Rabbi Daniel Epstein of Western Marble Arch Synagogue. It’s a “very slow and conservative process”, he explains, and as Judaism isn’t a proselytising religion, “the idea is to try and deter people, to encourage them to think carefully before making the step”. Even so, over the past year and a half he’s had two or three people reach out to him about the process.

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Lais

For Lais Fulgencio, October 7 strengthened her will to become a Jew. If anything, the war made things clearer.

“I know what we stand for. I know that we are on the right side. I know that we are not doing anything to prejudice anyone. We’re just living our lives, just keeping our faith. We’re just here, literally keeping our own business. They attacked us. They came after us,” she says.

Growing up in a Catholic family, Fulgencio was given her first taste of Judaism as a girl scout when she was set a project about the religions of the world and was allocated Judaism. She was never aware of a Jewish line in her family – a possibility which has recently emerged – but she recalls learning to make challah from her grandmother from the age of ten, though they never called it challah.

She met her first Jewish friends when she spent a year in Portugal for university aged 22, where she took part in festivals such as Chanukah and Purim. Back in Brazil in 2022, she began conversion with a Reform rabbi but was told that Orthodoxy might be better suited to her.

In December, she completed her conversion in Sydney, where she had moved to be with her Jewish now-fiancé. She’s “thrilled” to have finished the journey. Now, her Jewish friends will stop making the joke that she’s not a “Jew but Jew-ish”, she tells me.

It hasn’t been an easy ride. “I lost a couple of people that I actually thought were friends during the process,” she says. Course mates on her International Relations degree in Portugal began pressing her about Israel’s conduct in the war. She put up a fight but describes the barrage of questioning as “rough”.

Her new-found Jewish community has been “insanely supportive”, however. Since her wedding isn’t until February, she had to find a place to live away from her fiancé. A friend in Sydney, travelling to Vietnam, offered her her apartment. “She just gave me her keys and said, ‘Hey, you are my sister. Here are my keys, stay in my place for as long as you need.’ I don’t have anything but love for my community.”

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Anthony

Anthony Musa is a 32-year-old Mexican-American diplomat based in Washington DC. He finished his conversion with the Washington Hebrew Congregation in November 2023, a month after the October 7 attack. As a gay Hispanic, becoming a Jew was not his first experience of being in a minority group.

But his conversion did complicate his existing identities.

“There is an antisemitism that I think is unique to the LGBTQ community,” he tells me. “People don’t want to understand the nuances about and the differences between Judaism and Zionism, or Judaism and the State of Israel. People assume Jews are always Ashkenazi, that they’re white. They forget about Sephardic Jews, Ethiopian Jews. They have a certain view of, or caricature, of what Jews are, and who is Jewish.”

Anthony Musa[Missing Credit]

Musa is the president of Capital Pride, the organisation that puts on the annual Pride festival in Washington DC. He says there were “a lot of calls from the anti-Israel crowd for us to put out a statement saying that we oppose Israel”.

“And I was like, ‘No.’ And then I got targeted. They said, ‘It’s because you have a Jew on your board.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, no, that’s not the reason why.’” But he also says he’s experienced antisemitism since the attack only from within the queer community.

Brought up Catholic, he was made to take Hebrew studies as a child and was drawn to the tradition of conversation in Judaism. “I just embraced the arguments and discussion and centuries of back and forth that rabbis have within the sacred texts, and I loved that.”

After attending a Jewish service by chance while working in intelligence in the US army, Musa was hooked.

But since October 7, he’s noticed that his Judaism has become synonymous with support for Israel, despite the fact that the Jewish State didn’t play a huge role in his decision to convert.

“It was not something that was part of my thought process before and now it is,” he says.

“I think that there is pretty universal feeling among Jews that they have to be accountable for Israel,” he tells me. And social media has only made things worse. “It’s hard to take something that’s as complex as the centuries of Jewish history and distil it into 140 characters to say, ‘OK, well, Israel has no basis to exist.’”

Drawn to the way the Talmud promotes discourse rather than correctness, Musa values the diversity of political views about the Middle East conflict, however.

At his conversion ceremony, he invited several Jewish friends, among them a passionate Zionist and an anti-Zionist. “There’s the ability in Judaism to have that conversation with each other, which I really enjoy,” he observes.

Through an aunt taking a genealogy test, he’s recently found out that his family were expelled from Spain in 1492 and that’s how they ended up in Mexico, meaning there might be a Jewish line on his maternal side.

“My rabbi said that some people who convert do it because they have Jews in their ancestry. That’s a theory. ‘You’re going home’, is what she says.”

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Sarah

Sarah, 61, a former executive assistant of Trinidadian descent, grew up in a Christian family. She’s spent most of her life in Toronto but moved to Israel for her conversion to Orthodox Judaism in 2022 and now lives in Jerusalem.

When she told her family she was converting, they were displeased. “Many of them put me down. Many of them were not happy with me,” she remembers before saying they’ve now accepted her decision.

Sarah’s journey towards Judaism began when she started attending a “Messianic synagogue”. But after a trip to Israel for the high holy days she began immersing herself in “true Judaism” and says she “didn’t want to stop”.

“I was so absorbed in it. I was writing notes like crazy and I didn’t want to sleep. During Covid, I hardly ever slept because I had like 15 classes and a full-time job working from home. I probably slept like two or three hours a night, but I never got tired,” she says.

I’m not white, I’m brown- skinned. I’m a minority and in Canada, I’ve been facing racialism my whole life

She was in synagogue when the horrific events of October 7 took place. The attack made her “more determined” to be a Jew. “I don’t know how many people I comforted,” she says, referring to young women she knew whose husbands had gone to war.

“I helped them, and cared for them, and loved them, and just supported them, because it was a very challenging time for many people.”

Asked whether the rise in antisemitism has given her cause for pause, Sarah says she’s been “facing that my whole life”.

“I’m not white, I’m brown- skinned. I’m a minority and in Canada, I’ve been facing racialism my whole life. One of my friends said to me, ‘Sandra, you’re going to convert, and you’re going to be a Jew, and you’re going to be facing a lot of antisemitism.’

“I said: ‘You know what, I’ve been facing that my whole life. So, this is not new for me.’

“I just carry on the way I normally have, and I just pray a lot more.”

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Matthew

Matthew Vincent, 31, is a solicitor from Kentish Town, London. He began his Reform conversion in January 2023 with the West London Synagogue in anticipation of marrying his Jewish wife. He knew they’d bring up any children they had Jewish, which was a big motivating factor.

“I didn’t want to not understand and not be a part of it,” he says. “If that was going to be my life, then I really wanted it to be a full part of my life.”

By the time October 7 happened, he was immersed in his local Jewish community and found the events “horrifying”.

Matthew Vincent[Missing Credit]

“Prior to converting, I would have been horrified in the sense of what had happened to the people, but maybe I wouldn’t have felt such a personal connection. But being part of the community and seeing the links to Israel, I felt more personally affected. It felt like a very direct attack on just being Jewish,” he says. They had several sessions at shul about the impact of October 7 and what it meant for the community.

“It affected me more than I thought it would have done.”

He’s always been aware of antisemitism, particularly owing to his wife’s heritage and the fact that her grandmother escaped Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia on the Kindertransport, but Hamas’ attack was a turning point in his understanding of it.

“I suppose October 7 was the first time I really saw something so horrific since I’d been in the process [of converting].

“It wasn’t just that, but it was the wave of antisemitism that came afterwards, particularly in the UK.”

The soaring anti-Jewish hatred hasn’t made him question his own decision to convert, but it’s made him worried about his nine-month-old daughter.

“It made me realise that this reality was going to be something that was part of my life that obviously hadn’t been before. And it would be part of my children’s life.

“It may never be something that’s not part of your life, to go to synagogue and have to worry about your security.”

Whenever something terrible happens, as bad as it is, I think it makes a community come together

He found himself racked with anxiety when other commitments prevented him attending Rosh Hashanah services and his wife and daughter had to go without him. “I remember just being really worried about their safety. And it’s a shame for her [his daughter] that she’ll grow up in an environment where she has to have that security.”

The day before we spoke, he bumped into the chairman of a Jewish institution in Hampstead that had been attacked.

During Rosh Hashanah, when people were sending happy New Year messages to a neighbourhood WhatsApp chat he’s a member of, he noticed one person voice their objections, writing: “I don’t support people making these comments about an arbitrary calendar at this time.”

It is incidents such as these that have brought home to him the surge in antisemitism.

But in the wake of the October 7 attacks, he’s felt a greater sense of connection with other Jews.

“Whenever something terrible happens, as bad as it is, I think it makes a community come together,” he says. “There has been a lot of solidarity. When something very negative happens in the world, communities do pull together.”

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Joanne

Joanne Berridge, 56, is a British primary school teacher based in Valencia, Spain and in London. She began her conversion journey in 1990 during her first class with Rabbi Helen at West London synagogue. After a break she picked up the process in September 2022, completing it in December 2023.

In the wake of October 7, she felt that she had to reckon with what she thought about the Jewish State in a way she had never had to confront before. Though she spent time a happy time on a kibbutz in 1988 and would call herself a Zionist, the terror attacks forced her into confronting what Israel really meant to her.

Joanne Berridge (centre) celebrating her admission ceremony with sons Isaac and Daniel at West London Synagogue[Missing Credit]

“After the attacks, I felt I had to be sure of my feelings for Israel, as I was going to have to answer lots of questions. In Spain, sometimes it would be me and 12 other people who were definitely on the attack.

“So, you find yourself thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, I’m the spokesperson for liberal Judaism here.”

October 7 wasn’t a “make or break”, but it certainly compelled her to consolidate her belief in Israel and build confidence in this belief. “And then when I went to the Beth Din last March, the passage I chose was God’s love for Israel and for the people of Israel,” she says.

Last November, a month after the attack, Berridge was teaching in Tower Hamlets, the borough with the highest percentage of Muslims in England and Wales.

She was shocked when she walked into school in Poplar and was greeted with a group of Bengali teachers who came to hug and console her.

“I could see from their WhatsApp profiles, a lot of them had pro-Palestinian flags on them, but they said to me: ‘We’re all hurting, we’re all in the same boat.’” She says she didn’t experience hostility, but “understanding”.

Post October 7, Berridge once wore a Star of David into school, and a teacher recommended she hide it. But she feels at ease expressing her Jewish identity in the East End.

“East London’s always been a really big melting pot. We’re a community,” she says.