First was the effect of Covid when not only did people have “the desire to seek out the big questions about life and meaning and identity,” he said, but also the “time during lockdown to explore it, with a certain number finding that they felt at home in Judaism”.
Secondly, he explained, was “the popularity of DNA tests, often given as a present or undertaken for fun, but showing to people’s surprise that they had Jewish ancestry. While for some this is just an interesting fact, for others it leads them to investigate and then resume their Jewish roots.”
He believed that changes in the religious education curriculum in state schools, where children are being taught about more than one faith, had also had an impact.
“In 2010 pupils doing GCSE RE had to study two faiths, not just one, and Judaism was an option chosen by many schools,” he said. “It meant that both primary and secondary school children were exposed to Judaism and, if they were searching for a faith in later life and had positive memories of those encounters, they decided to adopt it.”
Last year’s Reform conversions were 43 per cent more than the average 117 for the years 2017 to 2023, while the Liberals were up by 38 per cent on their average of 69 for the previous seven years.
Lisa Godsal, lifecycle coordinator for Liberal Judaism, said an extra day at the movement’s Beit Din had had to be scheduled last October to accommodate the number of conversion candidates.
“Anecdotally we seem to be increasing in the number of registrations and we are fully booked until June this year and we have people booked into the Beit Din for 2025 each month through to September so far,” she said.
While a “small amount” related to marriage, she observed, “many want to reconnect with Jewish roots from generations ago but equally many find LJ a refuge either intellectually, culturally or spiritually or a safe space especially for those within the LGBTQ+ community.”
In 2015 the Reform movement followed the Liberals in introducing recognition of equilineal descent, meaning that the child of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother who had some Jewish upbringing could be accepted as Jewish without the need for conversion.
The convergence over Jewish status has paved the way for the unification of the two movements as Progressive Judaism, which is due to be completed shortly after two years’ preparation.
But formal approval by the membership of the two groups will be required before it can finally go ahead. Special meetings of delegates of affiliated synagogues are due to be arranged for after Pesach.
