This is a community that’s dedicated and focused on creating and celebrating Jewish lives, supporting each other.
Judy: I met my husband when he was fresh off of a trip to Israel; he had discovered Torah. He had grown up in Chicago, totally secular. We hit it off right away, except for this one problem: He was really interested in Orthodoxy. So, I thought, “There goes another one.” But I just liked him too much; he was too much of a mensch. We continued to go out and I realized that he was looking not just for a career, but a life. And even though I had grown up with a full engagement with Conservative synagogue and all my friends were Jewish, I started to realize that I didn’t really know very much about Judaism—what it really taught. I had a lot of stereotypes, preconceived notions, a lot of prejudice against anything that even had the word “Torah” in it. So that began the process. It was almost three years until we got married because I was fighting tooth and nail. But I saw that there was truth. And when I started really learning with Torah teachers, I thought, “This is real, and if I care about what’s true, then I need to pursue this.”
Debby: I think the starting point was a camp that my school miraculously instituted, which brought amazing Y.U. madrachim [Yeshiva University guides] into our lives. It was called Counterpoint, very radical, and it was my first really emotional experience of Judaism. It planted a seed that there was something here for me; that was around age 14, 15. Then I did really nothing. After I left school, I was focused on my career. Fast-forward to moving to LA to become an aspiring screenwriter, and Hashem [God], through Divine Providence, led me to the very beginnings of Aish HaTorah. They started teaching me and I was hooked. It played out from that point. I was in.
Yehudah: I’ve always been a spiritual seeker of some kind. I grew up in a secular environment where what I was exposed to from a Jewish perspective wasn’t scratching the itch of my thirst for spiritual development. So, I dabbled in a lot of areas and eventually had the chance to study Hasidus [Hasidic thought] with a rabbi, even though I wasn’t observant. I went through a divorce and found for the first time the ability to imagine a more observant lifestyle in line with what I was learning. I think it’s really a whole family project; I met my current wife soon afterward, and alongside me, she really took to pursuing observance. It was something we did together with a mission to make sure that when we had children, which was really important to both of us and brought us together, that they would feel a real sense of belonging, identity, and a source, a heritage, for how they could seek and find healthy ways to answer those questions.
