Hear the Stories of Catholic Converts from Judaism and learn what led them to embrace Jesus Christ in the Catholic Church.
“It opened up the communion of saints for me, and feeling God’s peace through the communion of saints, I chased that peace into the Catholic Church.”
– Dawn Eden Goldstein, Author of The Thrill of the Chaste
A FEW GREAT VIDEOS
Jeffrey Morrow 56:09
Invited to a Bible study in college, Jeffrey was shocked to realize that Christians actually believe that Jesus rose from the dead. He soon came to see that his atheism took more faith than belief in God.
Dr. Ronda Chervin 54:20
Rhonda began to study Philosophy to find the meaning of life and was drawn to Catholic art. While visiting Chartres Cathedral, she thought: How could something so beautiful be based on nonsense?
Roy Schoeman 54:45
“I had the privilege of seeing my life as though I were looking at it after death, and seeing everything I would be pleased about and everything I would wish I had done differently.”
A FEW GREAT WRITTEN STORIES
I Have Come Home
Janice Lockwood
I was born into an ultra-Orthodox Jewish home in…London, England, just after World War II. My parents shocked the Jewish community by conning an old priest into baptizing me one July Sunday into the Catholic Church. It happened when I was just eight weeks old. My dad had been interned in Auschwitz during the latter part of World War II. Should the Nazi menace raise its ugly head again, Mom and Dad could readily deny their Jewishness: After all, they’d had me baptized, hadn’t they?
Messianic and Catholic
Mark Neugebauer
Growing up in a Conservative Jewish home in suburban Toronto, I was a regular attendee at synagogue on Sabbaths and High Holy Days, and I lived a committed Jewish life. My father is a Polish Holocaust survivor from Auschwitz, and my mother’s family escaped the organized massacres of Jews in Russia. My sister and I were raised in Canada in a Jewish, Yiddish-speaking environment where all our friends were Jewish, and Israel was our raison d’être. Christianity was the religion of the outsiders, the faith of anti-Semites and Jew-haters, the creed of the Crusaders, Inquisitors, Persecutors, and Nazis. Yet my mother would remind me continually that “Jesus was a Jew.”
A Journey Home: From Jew to Evangelical to Catholic Nun
Mother Miriam of the Lamb of God, O.S.B.
“May He guide thy way, who Himself is thine everlasting end: That every step, be swift or slow, still to Himself may tend.” As I set out to do the unthinkable — to study the claims of the Catholic Church — I clung to this prayer, fearful that the enemy of our souls would deceive and render me useless for the kingdom of the Christ I had come to know and love.
A Jewish Girl’s Journey to Christ
Melissa Zelniker-Presser
As a young Jewish girl growing up in South Florida, I knew from a very early age that God was real. At the tender age of three, I had an encounter with God, where He became fully present and manifested Himself to me. He was there, like a friend, totally real, totally loving. At that time, of course, I didn’t know why He had chosen me and had come close to me in this way. I was so little, so young, and somehow that encounter was ingrained in me, etched into my soul. It wasn’t until later in life that I would discover the reason that He had chosen to come to me, stay with me, even as later I chose to walk away from Him.
More Inspiration for the Journey
Explore the full archive of conversion stories from former members of the Jewish faith.
Explore Full Archive
RECOMMENDED BOOKS & OTHER RESOURCES FOR JEWISH CONVERTS
Honey from a Rock
by Roy Schoeman
Schoeman, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, and best-selling author of Salvation Is From The Jews, once again shows the clear links between Judaism and Catholicism in these inspiring stories of sixteen Jews who became “fulfilled Jews”, as Schoeman says, through their spiritual journeys to the Catholic Church. Using the rich image in Psalm 81 for the book’s title, the author shows how God gave the Jews at Meribah refreshing water from the rock struck by Moses, but He promised ever so much more when they turn their whole hearts to Him – he will give them honey, sweetness itself, from the rock. The sweetness of Christ.
From the Kippah to the Cross
by Jean-Marie Elie Setbon
Jean-Marie was attracted to Jesus when he saw a crucifix at a young age. He contemplated becoming Catholic. Instead, he later moved to Israel, served in the Israeli Army, attended two different rabbinical schools and returned to France an ultra-Orthodox Jew. While teaching in a Jewish school, he was married and began to raise a family but his yearning for Jesus remained. Jean-Marie’s moving and unusual conversion story is about his battle between loyalty to his identity and fidelity to the deepest desires of his heart. Above all, it is a love story between Christ, the Lover—the relentless yet patient pursuer—and man, his beloved.
Before the Dawn
by Eugenia Zolli
This is the remarkable and inspiring story of how the famous and revered Chief Rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, became a Christian and entered the Catholic Church after World War II. Zolli was a world renowned Jewish leader and Scripture & Talmudic scholar, and an authority on Semitic philology. This classic work outlines the spiritual journey of Rabbi Zolli, through prayer, Scripture meditation and lived experience, from devout Judaism to Catholicism. He did not abandon his Jewish heritage but says he discovered the fullness of what God offered in Jesus and His Church. Zolli took the Christian name of Eugenio to honor Pope Pius XII (Eugenio was his baptismal name) for all he did to save Jews during WWII.
