Rabbi Adam Mintz on the changing dynamics of conversion after the pandemic and October 7

This interview was first published in the summer 2026 issue of Scribe Quarterly. The post Rabbi Adam Mintz on the changing dynamics of conversion after the pandemic and October 7 appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News .

Adam Mintz is the founder of Project Ruth, a program that helps people convert to Judaism. An Orthodox pulpit rabbi and academic, Mintz leads The Shtiebel, a community and congregation in Manhattan. “Over the past seven or eight years,” he says, “the number of conversions has grown, and then post-COVID and post–October 7th it has really exploded.”

Mintz has also written extensively about eruvim , the series of boundary markers that communities erect and maintain to define the borders of carrying on Shabbat, as well as two volumes of the Orthodox Forum, a series created to discuss major issues in the Orthodox Jewish community. We spoke about the shifting landscape of conversion within the Jewish community. Why do you think conversion rates have been increasing?

Post-October 7th, there were many people who felt this was their opportunity to identify with Israel, to identify with Judaism. For example, Israelis who come to America often want to set aside their Israeli identity. They meet a non-Jewish American and aren’t particularly interested in whether she converts or not.

But after October 7th, all of a sudden, it became important to them to be identified as Jews. I have a number of those couples where one spouse converted and now they’re raising Jewish families, sometimes even back in Israel. Pre-COVID, everybody had their rabbi, and if your rabbi didn’t want to do a conversion, you didn’t have many options: Orthodox rabbis are generally reticent to get involved in conversions.

But, during COVID, rabbi shopping became more common. People weren’t going to shul anymore; they didn’t have their rabbi. They could look around.

And, suddenly, people were finding rabbis outside their own community who were willing to do conversions. What are some of those barriers for Orthodox rabbis? What caused you to make conversions a big focus?

You could say the barrier is the tradition of pushing the convert away. [Editor’s note: Traditionally, rabbis would reject would-be converts three times, as a way of ensuring that only those who are truly serious about the process undertake it.] But I don’t think that’s the real reason.

I think it’s fear. Status is a big deal, and to suddenly declare someone Jewish was, I think, very frightening for a lot of rabbis. It was much easier to kick it upstairs — to send it to the RCA

[The Rabbinical Council of America, one of the main governing bodies for Orthodox rabbis. In 2008, it launched the Geirus Protocols and Standards program to centralize Orthodox conversions in North America.] The problem is that at some point you’re going to have someone in your shul whom you care about who needs to convert.

And all of a sudden kicking it to the RCA won’t be good enough, because them taking two or three years with no callbacks is going to be a real problem when they’re members of your congregation. I’ve had many rabbis call me in exactly those situations. I have noticed anecdotally that when someone Haredi has a child marrying someone who isn’t Jewish, the process for conversion seems to get expedited.

That’s the Ivanka [Trump] case — that’s certainly true. You bring up an interesting point about who and when and what gets expedited. There’s a big fear in the Haredi community of false negatives — of converting someone who isn’t sincere, who might have issues with their conversion later.

What’s the cost of that model? You can’t convert everybody who asks. If you convert everybody, you have no standards, and that’s something I grapple with.

In the non-Orthodox world, there’s an opinion that basically we should just have an open mikveh day, line everyone up, and make a lot more Jews. I understand that theory: we want more Jews. But you still have to have a process.

What I’ve tried to do with Project Ruth is really tighten that process. What happens is: someone calls me and, if you’re interested in joining Project Ruth, you go to the website, click apply, and it automatically sets up a 15-minute interview with me. I know within the first 30 seconds whether this is going to be right or wrong.

Nobody’s rejected, but I can tell whether this is going to be a good fit, whether this person is right for an Orthodox conversion, or whether they’re searching but don’t quite know what they want. Sometimes I can direct them elsewhere. Sometimes the whole thing might not be right for them.

Photograph by Adam Lerner Can you tell me about Project Ruth? What made me start it was that so many people wanted to convert that I felt I needed a system. What we do in Project Ruth is offer a series of online classes.

We require every conversion candidate to take five five-part mini-series over a period of six to twelve months. Topics include Shabbos, kashrut , Pesach, t’filah , the laws of taharat hamishpacha for women — the basics of Jewish life. We try to make it very serious; attendance is taken at every class, and there’s homework after every class.

Everybody gets a scorecard which they can access. We want them all to get 100%, but they have to earn it. If they do the homework, we’ll help them get the right answers.

But, if we see that, out of 25 classes they were absent for 10, and out of the 15 they attended they only did the homework for three — then they’re not ready for conversion. The good thing about Google Classroom and CRMs [user platforms] and the internet is they don’t lie. If they were in the class, we know they were in the class.

In addition to that, we want each conversion candidate to be part of a shul. That’s not always simple: they don’t always live walking distance to a shul or in a community with an Orthodox shul, so we help them find one. At the end, we ask for a letter from their rabbi confirming they attended shul for at least three months.

This raises an interesting question: to what extent do we conflate conformity with conviction? On the Haredi side, the argument is that the only thing we have to go on is conformity, and if someone maintains that conformity for two years they must be sincere, because nobody would pick this otherwise. On the other hand, there’s sometimes a reluctance to ask really hard questions about what people actually believe.

How do we balance? It’s very hard to judge sincerity. The only thing we can judge is commitment.

If someone goes to shul, they are committed. I don’t know what they’re thinking when they say Sh’ma Yisrael, but they’re going to shul on Shabbos, going to Friday-night dinners, participating. If their house is kosher, that’s a certain type of commitment.

I had a similar situation. Someone at a shul I was working at wanted his wife to convert, and he was born Jewish. He complained: “All these things you’re asking of me, none of my friends do — and they were born Jewish.

Their kids can have bar mitzvahs, and you’re asking us to come to shul every Shabbos for a year without missing anything.” My only response was that, once you’re in, you get more leeway. But in order to get in you have to show your commitment.

He said it wasn’t fair, and I somewhat agree with him. That’s a very serious point. It is true that I want converts to come to shul more regularly.

If my congregants skip a couple of weeks, they skip a couple of weeks. If a convert skips two weeks, I want to know what’s up. Conversion doesn’t just have religious barriers; Jewish society is insular.

Do we have a responsibility to potential converts in that area? Or is the rabbi’s job just to handle the religious components? The social piece is very important.

There are rabbis who won’t officiate at the weddings of converts, making things very difficult. My conversions will never have the same standing as RCA conversions. They have created a monopoly where they’ve gotten the Chief Rabbinate of Israel to accept their conversions and not mine.

I’m blocked out through the front door. As the old saying goes: if you can’t get in through the front door, go through the window. But it’s always easier through the front door.

Even converts who come in the front door have trouble socially integrating. Converts who come in through the window, that’s all the more complicated. To add to that: when something does go wrong, when a convert isn’t accepted by the community, we tend to say the person didn’t try hard enough.

The community is generally seen as blameless, without asking whether we had the right structures in place to truly welcome that person. Obviously, that’s right. A community that truly works with people on the margins is the exception.

Converts are among those people on the margins where we’re not doing a good enough job. I want to look at the demographics of people being converted, because it’s an area people don’t quite have language for. There’s this notion of “not looking Jewish,” which we know really means “not looking Ashkenazi.”

Historically, looking Jewish meant someone felt safe, they were part of the group. How do we hold that reality while acknowledging that “you don’t look Jewish” is problematic and racialized? We’re much better than we were 30 years ago, and obviously much better than we were 75 years ago.

That’s just a question of time. That’s being replaced by the fact that people are converting and Jewish families are being created that look different from the Ashkenazi norm. The more that happens, the better off we’ll be.

Those converts who look different know which shuls are welcoming and which aren’t. But you and I know that’s true for us too — if we don’t wear a black hat, not every shul is right for us. So we make a big deal about it with converts, but the truth is it affects even us Ashkenazi Jews.

Do you think the non-Orthodox world has its own blind spots by having an open-door policy on conversions? I mean, for them it largely makes sense — they want more Jews, they want more in-marriage. The problem is: are they really Jewish?

You can have a more lenient policy about what’s required for conversion, but if you have no policy at all, it’s hard to say they’re Jewish. The downside is they’re creating Jewish families that aren’t really Jewish families. That’s a serious issue.

Sometimes it’s fantastic, but sometimes they’re creating Jewish families that aren’t really practicing or acting as Jews. We have to talk about what it means to live a real Jewish life, to be converted to a real Jewish life. There doesn’t seem to be much data about conversion and long-term retention, though anecdotally, it can be spotty.

Wouldn’t the conversion process be so much better if we had the right follow-up tools and data? For sure. We’ve now introduced a post-conversion class and have seven people in it.

It’s very hard — we converted 191 people and I have seven in the class, because I don’t hold anything over them. It’s only people who want to learn. That doesn’t mean only seven are actually living Jewishly.

But it’s very, very hard to get people to commit post-conversion. What’s one thing you’d suggest to other conversion programs, Orthodox or not? You’ve got to give people a finish line, and you have to honour that finish line.

You can make it hard. You can require a lot. You can say it takes three years, and you have to know Modeh Ani.

That’s all fine. But, when they get to the goal line, you have to allow them to score a touchdown. Part of the problem with some of these programs is [would-be converts] get to the one-yard line, and [the community] builds a wall at the one-yard line.

That’s not acceptable. *** Subscribe for free to Scribe Quarterly ® , The CJN’s print magazine, to receive upcoming editions mailed directly to your door! The post Rabbi Adam Mintz on the changing dynamics of conversion after the pandemic and October 7 appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News .