In the Press

(RNS) — Vanessa Bloom recalls her rabbi gently reminding her that she still had time to walk away. But she felt compelled toward the Jewish faith.
“I knew my fate was already tied to the Jewish people,” she told RNS.
Bloom, a Jewish day school teacher in Los Angeles, was raised in a multifaith family, threw herself into Jewish life at college and co-led local gatherings of the Asian-Jewish Lunar Collective. She’d completed a comprehensive modern Orthodox conversion program study course.Now the f...

By Deborah Danan –  August 29, 2025 5:28 pm – Jewish Telegraphic Agency

For Bobby Apperson, who relocated from San Francisco to New York in search of a larger LGBTQ Jewish community, the trip to Israel was his first. Before leaving, he had watched a social space he had frequented in San Francisco come under repeated attack. Manny’s, a Mission District café owned by civic advocate and queer Zionist Manny Yekutiel, had its windows smashed and graffiti scrawled across the walls. Messages read: “...

Times of Israel - JTA — Renee Godinez had completed nearly all the steps to becoming Jewish before the coronavirus pandemic descended earlier this spring.
She had studied extensively with Rabbi Rick Winer of Temple Beth Israel in Fresno, California, and adopted Jewish practices in her life. All that was missing was a ceremony to mark the end of the conversion process.
Traditional Jewish law requires a meeting with a beit din, a court usually made up of three rabbis, and immersion in a ritual bath called a mikvah,...

Voyage LA Magazine | LA City Guide: Today we’d like to introduce you to Bobby Apperson.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Bobby.