Yosef Juarez was born into a Christian family in Honduras yet in a dramatic twist of fate, converted to Judaism along with his minister and fellow congregants. While he was learning about Torah, his future wife Tzipporah was embarking on her own journey — from Islam and the Koran to a kosher beis din. Together they’re putting down authentic Jewish roots, and helping other bewildered newcomers navigate a confusing new reality

10

years ago, Minister Hector Flores was leading his bewildered congregation on a journey into the unknown. After intensive research and soul-searching, he had come to the conclusion that Christianity was untenable, and all arrows were pointing him toward Judaism and the Torah. But would his parishioners — several hundred Christians of Central American origin living in Houston who had come to trust him implicitly — follow him on such a life-altering path? Yosef Juarez was just 19 at the time, but he knew that if Hector said this was the way to emes, he wanted to be counted in.

10

years ago, Tzipporah was in the US on a student visa, having left her Muslim family back home in Tunis to study in an American university. She was the youngest child of a privileged Tunisian family, valedictorian of her high school, and a talented violinist as well — a super-achiever whose parents knew she would excel with the opportunities they gave her. But instead of following the straight path of academia they’d laid out for her across the ocean, she was sitting in a rabbi’s study in Brooklyn waiting for the go-ahead to convert. “Do you realize that, given your background, you might remain a spinster forever?” the rabbi said in an honest attempt to deflect her decision. “I don’t care,” she said. “At least I know I’ll be living with the truth.”

I

n some ways, Yosef and Tzipporah Juarez are a typical olim family living in Ramat Beit Shemesh. They belong to the English-speaking Kehillas Shivtei Yeshurun under the guidance of Rabbi Yaacov Haber, host seminary girls for Shabbos, shop for their favorite American brands in Osher Ad, and together with a few dozen other enterprising immigrants, they rent desk space at Subs, a co-working hub for start-ups in the Beit Shemesh industrial zone where Yosef is growing his web-developing business.

But Yosef and Tzipporah are anything but typical. Yosef was born in Honduras to evangelical Christian parents, and Tzipporah’s family members are proud Muslim Arab nationals of Tunisia’s upper crust — and ardent anti-Semites to boot. The separate stories of their childhoods, the drastic transitions they made as young adults, the merging paths leading to their shidduch, and the international bridges of peace they’ve created since their marriage in 2009 serve as a blueprint of inspiration to so many others today who are trudging the complex path of spiritual transformation.

“Hashem has blessed us with this special journey, and everything that we’ve been through — from navigating complex family dynamics to learning how to integrate into a totally foreign culture — has led us to discover our special mission in all this,” says Yosef. He’s referring to an ambitious international program he calls the Jewish Continuity Project — it already has the backing of Ner LeElef and other major kiruv organizations — which he hopes will serve as the frontline of support for those having gone through life-altering spiritual transitions.

“We’ve experienced firsthand the challenges of making such drastic changes and what it means to leave behind your entire support system, so this is something that’s been brewing in my head for years,” Yosef explains. “There’s this misconception that once you’ve found Judaism you’ve found your way, but the reality is that when you arrive you realize the frum world is an extremely complex, pluralistic, and nuanced environment with many possible options, and a lot of people have a hard time figuring out where they belong.”

Many geirim and baalei teshuvah are still grappling with serious identity issues, all the more painful when they’ve lost their emotional, and often financial, support base. If only they could key into a network that would give them the continued education, appropriate spiritual guidance, advice, and even practical career assistance that would lead to real jobs for the many who became frum before completing their education.

Yosef sees the surprising success of his own company — which he created as a model for employing others in his situation — as a Divine wink that he’s on the right track. “This is b’ezras Hashem the framework we’re building. Baalei teshuvah experience tremendous hardship and heartache when trying to superficially fit into a polarized frum society and deal with the inherent challenges. We want to give people in these difficult situations the help they need to live happy, meaningful Jewish lives, and most importantly, to give them the capacity to joyously transmit Judaism and Torah values to their children.”

Yosef Juarez isn’t shy about telling the amazing story of his entire congregation’s embrace of Judaism, and he says that’s one reason people in similar situations have been drawn to him over the last decade. “When you know who you are and where you’re going, it gives chizuk to the other travelers on your path,” he says. “I’m not one of those people who think integration means hiding my past. That’s why I kept my last name after my conversion. And anyway, you look at me and you know I’m not a Goldberg.”

Y

osef was born in La Ceiba, Honduras to a Christian family who was strongly affiliated with a relatively young outreach-oriented Protestant evangelical church (Honduras has always been predominantly Catholic). He says his parents felt a close G-dly presence in their lives, starting with his own personal miracle when he was three years old and fell from a second-story porch head-first onto the concrete, fracturing his skull. He was rushed to the hospital unresponsive, where doctors gave a fatalistic prognosis. But by the next morning, it was as if nothing happened. New X-rays showed no sign of damage and no fracture at all.

They saw G-d’s grace then, and again the year Yosef was eight and the family was granted visas to enter the US in search of better financial opportunities. The family settled in Houston, Texas, where they looked for a church that would provide them with the same inspiration they’d known, “but in America religion was more relaxed, and the churches were more like social clubs,” Yosef says. “My parents didn’t want that. G-d played a big role in our lives and we wanted to stay connected to Him.”

Finding another like-minded immigrant family from Honduras, they requested that the evangelical church they left behind, which has branches in the US, send them out a minister. “The church was very outreach oriented, so they sent us a charismatic, very dedicated ‘shaliach’ from New Orleans named Hector Flores, who relocated with his family. When he first came out to see us, guitar on his shoulder, we were ten people in a garage. But he was incredible, and within ten years we grew to 500 members.

“Growing up,” Yosef continues, “my life was the church. I was a youth pastor and went through the youth minister program. I was ready to dedicate my life to the ministry, to outreach.”

But then something happened. Minister Flores became fascinated with certain Torah concepts such as Yetzias Mitzrayim, the wandering in the desert, and the construction of the Mishkan. In traditional Christian doctrine, the Jews “lost their place” as the Chosen Nation after the Cheit Ha’eigel, but according to Flores’ biblical research, it just didn’t seem right. Meanwhile, concepts like maaser and tzedakah were studied, and so were concepts related to the Festivals and Yamim Tovim.

“Our church was unique in that it was very study-oriented — we didn’t just accept church doctrine at face value — and soon Minister Flores began to doubt the veracity of Christian theology,” Yosef explains. “He began researching the original early Greek texts that were the basis of the New Testament, and discovered that much of the philosophy and imagery — including the persona of Yoshke which echoed the Greek half-man, half-god Zeus — were patterned after pagan ideology and Greek mythology before the religion was codified under the Roman emperor Constantine three centuries later.

“People would come to our church and wonder what was going on. It no longer sounded like mainstream Christianity, and what was with all those Jewish ideas? During that time, about half the congregants dropped out — as much as they loved Hector, it was just too much for them. Hector himself didn’t know where this was leading, but he wasn’t sad — he knew it was a filtering process and he had to be true to himself.”

B

y this time Minister Flores was on his own track to conversion — he had been in touch with a Chabad rabbi and with Houston’s Orthodox congregational leader Rabbi Joseph Radinsky z”l (Rabbi Radinsky passed away this past February) — but what about his congregation? What would he tell them?

“We were like one big family,” Yosef remembers, “and every Sunday after church we would have a cookout during which Hector would speak to us about spiritual matters. My mother had been following his path closely and after reading some anti-missionary material of her own, it was clear to her where Hector was headed, so there in the park she cornered him, begging him, ‘Minister Flores, what is really going on? Please tell us everything.’ So he sat down on the grass and told us exactly where he was up to. This was his congregation — could he tell them Christianity was wrong? That it was all a fraud? Everyone was crying, as we sat there for hours until way after dark. He told us he couldn’t be our Christian minister anymore, and some people left. But about 80 people stayed, including my family. We were going on the journey with him.”

Hector Flores felt the next step was to take two families at a time to shul. He had made up that the following Shabbos morning he and his wife would meet these families outside the synagogue, but somehow everyone heard about the plan — and much to Hector’s shock, all 80 people showed up outside Houston’s United Orthodox Synagogues in their Sunday best.

“It was early and we were the first ones there. Shul hadn’t even started yet,” says Yosef of the first day he set foot in a synagogue. “The rabbi didn’t know we were coming, the congregants didn’t know we were coming, and to top it off, there was a bar mitzvah that Shabbos. Finally someone escorted us in and here was this wall in the middle of the room. They separated the men and women, gave us these silk yarmulkes, and sat us in the back. People turned around and saw what looked like a Mexican church in the back of their shul. Some people thought we were guests of the bar mitzvah.

“But we were too excited to care. We didn’t understand a thing — people standing, then sitting, then standing, up, down, up, down, and three hours of a language we’d never heard. Still, it was a bit of a trauma. The congregants were suspicious. The kehillah didn’t understand why we were there and what we wanted from them.”

Needless to say, the church fell apart. “But we didn’t know where to go from there,” says Yosef, “so the shul became our focal point. Finally Rabbi Radinsky provided us with a Spanish-speaking rabbi, Rabbi Jose Gomez, himself a ger tzedek.

“Basically their motto was, ‘Keep the seven, go to Heaven.’ Why convert if you can keep the Seven Noachide laws? Actually, many of the families were good with that, while others moved forward with Hector.”

In the end, Hector, his wife, and children — including a married daughter — converted. He’s now Moshe Chaim and is still living in Houston, and his married children are active in the New Orleans kehillah. After that, three other families converted along with him. And the Juarez family?

“It’s ironic, but in the end, so far I’m the only one of my four siblings that converted.”

Yosef’s father and brothers became bnei Noach, and his mother, Flores’ longtime devoted disciple, is still on the journey. His parents subsequently divorced and both are now remarried; Yosef’s mother and her new husband live in the Orthodox community, keep kosher, and are in the process of converting.

Why did Yosef do it? Why didn’t he remain a ben Noach like the rest of his family and live the life of a righteous gentile?

“I was young, but I was already thinking ahead and imagining a family,” says Yosef. “How would I feel if my daughter would come home with a Christian? If my children would decide to be Christians? It would be devastating, so I knew I needed to go all the way.”

After his conversion, Yosef went on a Birthright trip to Eretz Yisrael and found himself in Aish HaTorah. Upon returning home to Houston a year later, he headed east to Ohr Somayach in Monsey, where he continued learning for two more years. While he was there, a friend suggested a shidduch, a giyores from a Muslim family in Tunisia.

“I thought I had a special story,” he says, “until I met my future wife.”

"E

very Shavuos I cry because I’m not only thinking about Rus, but about Orpah,” says Tzipporah Juarez in perfect, nearly unaccented English with lots of frum-speak thrown in that rolls unaffectedly off her tongue. Meeting Tzipporah, you might think she has some Sephardi blood — but you’d be hard-pressed to guess that until age 19, she was a Tunisian Muslim. “Orpah saw the emes but she couldn’t embrace it. I identify with her. I know that feeling of guilt, of knowing the truth but not knowing whether or not you have it in you to hop on the train and make the sacrifice. But I also knew that if I didn’t get on, I would regret it until the day I died.”

Tunisia is a virulently anti-Semitic country which in recent years has been swept up by a massive wave of Arab nationalism, and except for her close family, people in her former community assume she’s still in the US and married to an American from Texas — no great kavod for her Muslim family, but certainly not as big a disgrace as converting, marrying an Orthodox Jew, and moving to Israel.

Tzipporah grew up in an upper-class suburb off the Mediterranean coast, and for her parents, education was paramount. Her father, who works for a humanitarian organization, raised his children with a western worldview; yet although he wasn’t especially devout and she and her sisters wore typical Western clothing (no hijabs or burkas for them, although after 9/11 and a resurgence of allegiance to Islam, the garb became more popular in her school), they all identified as Muslims and fasted on Ramadan. (Well, Tzipporah admits, at least her mother did. She’d always been the most religious one in the family.)

Her older siblings were European-educated professionals, so it was only natural that when she turned 18, she too would receive a Western education. A high-achiever with top grades, she was accepted to university in Washington, D.C., where she was finally able to explore the existential questions that had been bothering her for so many years of her youth: “G-d, how do I connect to You? I’m not finding You in the Koran. Do You exist? If not, then what am I doing here?”

Growing up, Tzipporah always had an irritating penchant for truth and integrity. She remembers watching some anti-Israel propaganda on Al Jazeera when she was 13 and commenting to her cousin, “You know this is biased, don’t you. We have no idea what the other side says.”

Her interest in Judaism as a viable alternative to fill her empty soul was piqued by a fellow violinist she was in contact with through an online music forum. Not only was he Jewish, but Orthodox as well. She was amazed that he actually believed in the Divine nature of the Torah he was learning, the same Torah handed down from Har Sinai, while she knew the Koran had gone through many versions and revisions. Could the answers to her quest be there, on the other side of the divide? She wanted to find out, and began pouring over Jewish content websites such as Aish.com and Chabad.org.

“I thought I’d checked out everything,” she says. “How, I wondered, did I miss all this?”

When her e-mail friend told her he’d be off-line over Shabbos, she was incredulous. “I couldn’t believe that there were really people out there who actually took off 25 hours each week to connect to G-d and reaffirm Him as the Creator of all things. I wrote back that I also wanted to keep Shabbos. When he answered that it was forbidden for a non-Jew to keep Shabbos, I was devastated.”

Tzipporah sought out an Orthodox rabbi in Washington, but he wasn’t enthusiastic about her plan to become Jewish. “You have too many things against you,” he said. “You can accomplish more by being a righteous gentile and advocating for the Jews as a Muslim.”

She wasn’t discouraged though, and began spending time in the shul until a helpful congregant advised her that the place to go to live a full Jewish life was Brooklyn. Israel was out of the question, as her parents were footing the bill for her support, so she told them she was transferring to college in New York. Instead, she enrolled in seminary in Crown Heights, and eventually moved over to Ohr Naava Women’s Torah Center in Flatbush, where she was mentored by Rabbi Meir Fund, a dayan and rav of the “Flatbush minyan.”

Meanwhile, her parents got wind of her new trajectory and were furious. That, she says, was the most painful part of the journey — the estrangement from the family she loved, the break from her parents.

“The Jewish thing was anathema to my father,” Tzipporah says. “He begged me, ‘you want to be spiritual? I’ll pay for your ticket to Nepal, to Tibet. Become a Buddhist. Become anything — just not a Jew!’ My family was going crazy. They threatened to come and get me, accused me of being in a sect that was brainwashing me. My father would fly to the US every three months to try to convince me to leave.”

Family members even threatened to have a psychiatrist declare her mentally unfit, and have her deported back to Tunisia. And once they realized that her conversion decision was final, they cut her off financially.

Four years after her journey began, beis din head Rav Meshulam Halberstam agreed to finalize her geirus, although he, too, was wary at first, dragging out the process because of a real concern that after the conversion was finalized, her parents would come and take her away. Even Rabbi Fund called her a week before the conversion was final with a dire warning: “You might wind up never marrying — you’ll be Jewish, but you might be a 50-year-old spinster with no husband, no children, no Shabbos table, none of the things you’ve dreamed about.”

“It didn’t matter at that point,” Tzipporah says. “I knew that with my background, who would want to marry me? I considered that possibility. True, I might wind up being the old auntie who’s free to babysit and do chesed, but at least I’d be living with truth and purpose and doing what Hashem wants.”

T

hat obviously wasn’t Hashem’s plan, though. Two years after her conversion, Tzipporah’s roommate, who happened to be from Houston, had an idea: What about that nice fellow, that ger tzedek from Honduras who used to eat Shabbos meals at her parents?

“Talk about a small world,” says Tzipporah, six and a half years later. “She’s now my neighbor in RBS.”

Both Yosef and Tzipporah were broke, and considered getting married in someone’s backyard. But then, thanks to special community members and a benefactor who heard about the shidduch and decided to foot the entire bill, the wedding was held in a proper hall — with an unforgettable guest list to match.

Yosef’s family was there, as was Moshe Chaim Flores and his family, and dozens of non-Jewish friends who’d journeyed together from the old congregation. But the biggest surprise was Tzipporah’s mother.

“You get married once in your life,” she told her daughter in a surprise phone call two weeks before the wedding. “I’m coming. I want to see you as a bride.”

“For my father, the wedding was the nail in the coffin,” says Tzipporah. “But my mother — she’s just like that. She’s a devout woman with a big heart. And you know, she has her mitzvos, too. In Tunis during Ramadan, she goes around before the fast is over distributing food to everyone, and when the weather is hot, she freezes bottles of water and goes around to the construction sites passing them out to the laborers.”

As hard as the break from her family was, Tzipporah never harbored much hope for reconciliation — but then something changed. She gave birth to their baby daughter Tzofia and suddenly her father began to thaw.

“He didn’t speak to me for two years, but on Tzofia’s first birthday he called — he wanted to open a bank account for her. Since then, on every birthday and Muslim holiday, he deposits a check in her account.”

In 2011, the young Juarez couple, who had been living in Brooklyn, moved back to Houston for a year before making aliyah. Despite their Spanish and Mideastern countries of origin, they have built their Jewish home according to Ashkenazi minhagim, following the customs of their teachers and mentors.

“My mother’s biggest nachas is that she has a Jewish son and grandchild,” says Yosef. They wanted to try to share that nachas with Tzipporah’s family too — but would they be game?

“In the end, my mother accepted our invitation and spent a month with us in Houston. She was very respectful, and people who didn’t know us well just assumed she was a Jewish Moroccan lady. One Shabbos we were at a kiddush and a woman from the neighborhood who speaks French went over to talk to her and keep her company while I moved over to speak to some friends. When I got back, my mother told me in Arabic, ‘That woman was angry because she said you’re Ashkenazi. I have no idea what that means, but she was upset that I’m letting you wear a wig. She said I have to stick up for my Sephardi Moroccan pride. Can you explain what she was talking about?’

“Things began to soften after that. At the airport, my mom turned to me and said, ‘I see you have a good life, filled with peace and serenity. It makes sense the way you have G-d in your life. If I’d stay another month I’d probably also start blessing my food like you do.’

“I was so happy to have a relationship with my mom again, but making aliyah was a huge step backward for them. My dad considers Israel stolen land and that put a clamp on everything.”

But time did its work, and last year Yosef, Tzipporah, and little Tzofia flew to Casablanca, Morocco, for a week to join Tzipporah’s parents in a hotel. “We wouldn’t go to Tunisia where your life is in danger if they find out you’re Jewish, but meeting together on neutral ground showed them we’re still normal, and that we care about the relationship,” she says.

Today they speak a few times a week using Internet communication, and Yosef says that “we actually have a great relationship” as long as they avoid certain topics. “He still can’t say the word ‘Israel,’ ” says Yosef. “He calls it ‘that place.’ ”

A

lthough Israel is a melting pot of cultures, newcomers to Torah often feel the sting of discrimination when it comes to education and social integration in the wider frum world. Yosef, however, wears his story as his badge of honor.

“I’m not saying discrimination doesn’t exist, but through our networking, with all the baalei teshuvah I’ve worked with, I’ve come to believe a lot of it is self-inflicted because it often has to do with how you perceive yourself,” says Yosef. “If you feel you’re on the fringe, that you’re the miskein who will never fit in, who will never ‘get it,’ then that’s how people will relate to you. And they might give you patronizing, inappropriate advice, directing you to a place that isn’t really the right fit for you, so you’ll always feel incompetent, alienated, that you’ll always be a beginner, that you don’t belong, and can never make a contribution. This is devastating. Everyone needs to feel he can make a contribution, and we hope our network will be able to alleviate some of this pain.”

What does their own family’s future look like? “Well, if you want to know if we’re nervous about it — about schools, about shidduchim for our children because our lives started out so different? Look, on my wife’s teudat zehut, under ‘father’ it says ‘Ahmed’ so there’s no point in hiding. But we’ve never had any problems because we’re always upfront about who we are. I believe that the more honest we are, the better adjusted our own family will be, and the more we’ll be able to reflect that back to others who are struggling.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha Issue 613)