princess8888888 writes that she is thinking of converting to Judaism. “I have been looking into Jewish conversion for a while and everyone keeps saying Jews will never consider you a Jew – I have never found this to be the case. So there’s something that I really wanted to get off my chest, and that is that I have been looking into Judaism since I was a child. I’m currently 28 years old, female, based in London. I was born into a Muslim family.

“Obviously the Muslims around me are constantly telling me that, Oh, you can convert to Judaism as much as you want. You can be as Orthodox as you want. You can run away from your culture as much as you want, but the Jews are never going to consider you as one of their own. They’re never going to consider you a Jew. You’re always going to be a second-class citizen, even if you make aliyah and you move to Israel, you’ll be a second-class citizen, and all sorts of things, okay?

“And then they’ll go into, like, basically racial stuff, as in, Oh, you’ll always be the ethnicity that you are. You’re never going to be considered a Jew. But the thing is, there are so many Jews of different ethnicities from all over the world. Like, not all Jews are Ashkenazi.

“So there’s obviously this issue from the Muslims, and then when you tell the white people, they also be like, Oh, they will never consider you a Jew anyway. The same things as what they say, that you’ll always be a second-class citizen. But this is completely different from my actual lived experience of visiting shuls and visiting Chabads, because every time I’ve been to a Chabad, nobody’s even asked me, Are you Sephardi? Are you Ashkenazi? Are you Mizrahi? Nobody’s asked me anything like that.

“Whereas at churches I have always been asked “what are you?” Technically I look very ambiguous so it’s hard to place me. I’ve just always felt at home, and nobody’s even ever asked me if I even am Jewish. Like, they just assume that I am Jewish. So I’ve never felt like a second-class citizen. In fact, I felt more second-class citizen among the people I’ve grown up with in London, among my own people from my own community.

“So I’ve always felt like I don’t belong neither here nor there. But with the Jewish people, I felt like I found my home. I felt like I........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)