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One was born Catholic, another was a West Virginia Protestant — now they’re all making Jewish art
In artist Yona Verwer’s “Immersion VIII,” a nude woman in a fetal position floats in a swirl of water. The image is at once ethereal and surreal, not unlike Verwer’s first mikveh experience, a purification ritual, and central to conversion, the transition from non-Jew to Jew.
“It is the joy of weightlessness and the feeling of being spiritually elevated,” said Verwer, the co-founder of the Jewish Art Salon, who was born Catholic in the Netherlands and converted to Judaism in 1995.
“Five years after my conversion I started including Jewish subject matter in my paintings, that is to say contemporary visual interpretations of ancient texts,” she added. “I also examine contemporary themes like identity, ecology, antisemitism and more through a Jewish lens.”
“Immersion VIII” is one of 17 works in an original and perhaps unprecedented exhibit, “Children of Ruth: Artists Choosing Judaism,” currently running at the Heller Museum at Hebrew Union College. The thought provoking display features the paintings, drawings, collages, found objects and sculptures created by artists who have discovered a home through conversion. Some of the pieces are abstract, others representational and still others combinations thereof or not readily definable at all. None of it is kitschy, reductive or derivative.
Hailing from across the globe and representing an array of ethnic, social and religious backgrounds, all the artists have forged work informed by various aspects of their conversions. There is commentary on biblical texts, illustrations of Jewish rituals and others that merge imagery from the artists’ early backgrounds with representations of and metaphors for Judaism and Jewish life. In more than a few pieces, the Golem — the ultimate outlier who is nevertheless the mystical protector of the Jewish people — makes an appearance.
“I wanted to be Jewish from the time I was 11 despite knowing almost nothing about Judaism, and not meeting a Jew until I was 19,” Verwer said. “It felt irrational, but later, the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s words resonated — that sincere converts to Judaism possess an inherent Jewish soul, even prior to their formal conversion. In other words, converts are not outsiders but returning kin.”
The reasons for the artists’ conversions run the gamut. Kate Hendrickson grew up in West Virginia, the child of Protestants. Her mother was a choral director and organist and her father sang in the choir in both Presbyterian and Methodist churches. Neither parent was doctrinaire in their beliefs.
“I couldn’t buy Christian dogma at all or the idea that Jesus was the savior,” she said. “I married a Sephardic Jew who was raised in Morocco. His family embraced me, especially his mother. I used to follow her around in the kitchen, studying her recipes. When she died at 97, I felt ungrounded and wanted to explore Judaism. The rabbi suggested I do independent study and I attended services. Still, I wondered when I would become Jewish. A friend, another convert, said that she just woke up one morning and knew she was a Jew. The rabbi said, ‘Anytime will be a good time for you.’ I love Judaism because it feels so open-ended. It feels like home.”
In “Concealed Faith,” Hendrickson’s first series of post-conversion drawings, Hebrew letters, which are an integral part of her Cubist designs, are concealed. In the series that followed, “Faith Revealed,” Hebrew letters are even more central to the aesthetic and more clearly visible, at least to the attuned eye. Further, Hebrew letters inform the way she creates her art.
Hendrickson translates the title of each work into Hebrew, then creates cut-outs of each Hebrew letter.
“I rub graphite over the cut-outs and then randomly drop them onto my paper and rub them across the drawing, their edges and curves serving as structures for the composition.”
A number of the artists said Judaism appealed to them because of its openness to interpretation and reinterpretation, adding how much they valued the chance to express unexpected or even controversial viewpoints in their imagery.
Artist Mike Cockrill, a social justice advocate who has studied Torah for two decades, puts forth a feminist vision in his piece, “Excavation,” which reinvents Judaism’s patriarchal tradition.
Here, two women, posed in a manner that hints at Egyptian forms, are engaged in a metaphorical excavation. One holds a book, while the other, paintbrush in hand “is ready to repaint, rewrite, the traditional history from which she may have been excluded or been misrepresented,” he said. “Patriarchy lies at the women’s feet in the form of a blindfolded and disembodied head.”
Before Cockrill’s formal conversion, many of his paintings embodied an Americana vernacular, at times a tad mocking. During his Torah study period, his paintings made a radical shift, embracing an aesthetic that addressed the human condition, “the existential man, the meaning of life, which is funny but also dark,” he said.
“The rabbi who converted me was concerned that conversion would affect my painting in a negative way, that I would be doing Jewish kitsch,” he recalled. “I want to embrace my Judaism without pandering or being obvious and corny.”
Other artists combine ethnic or cultural elements of their pre- and post- conversion lives. Carol Man forged a design that couples Hebrew and Chinese calligraphy. Vicky Vogl, the daughter of an Ecuadorian mother and Czechoslovakian Jewish father, created an exquisitely detailed puppet theater depicting a Golem in a setting that also embraces a Latino aesthetic.
“The clock has Hebrew letters and the hands move counterclockwise,” she said. “The colors and craftsmanship are Ecuadorian and European.”
The genesis of this exhibit was almost a fluke. Curator Nancy Mantell recalled that at an earlier exhibit about the Torah, one artist revealed that she was Norwegian, had converted to Judaism, and was working on a textile project based on Torah portions. “We were so impressed by her commitment to her Jewish learning it made us start thinking, ‘Wow, are there other artists who have joined the Jewish people and have Jewish themes in their art?’” Mantell recorded.
She and Susan Picker, the assistant curator, put out a request for submissions. Throughout the process of choosing submissions, Picker says she was taken with the artists’ “love of Judaism and a sense of return to their deepest souls, with a love of grappling with Jewish texts.”
Alan Hobscheid, who grew up in Chicago, the son of a lapsed Catholic father and Japanese mother, became exposed to Judaism in college through friends and later married a Jewish woman. To some degree his conversion was expedient and, simultaneously, an expression of osmosis, he admitted. But, also, he stressed he always had a curiosity about Judaism.
As a convert he was especially drawn to the way that “Judaism doesn’t sugar coat or obfuscate God’s relationship to man,” he said. “The doubt and skepticism spoke to me. So does the duality in many of the customs, such as the cleaning up and preparation for Passover. It’s very serious, but there are fun elements.”
Still, in his oil painting, “Bedikat Chametz,” the literal darkness of that pre-Pesach ritual especially spoke to him. The painting portrays a man on the floor in a darkened space, scrounging around, searching for the last bits of leavened bread in order to dispose of it.
“It’s not despairing at all,” said Hobscheid. “There’s a beauty in it and conversion is a similar process. You must leave something behind in order to move on to something else.”
“Children of Ruth” runs through Feb. 26 at the Heller Museum at Hebrew Union College.
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The call of this Hanukkah moment remains simple and urgent: Light candles everywhere. Even when we’re under attack.
The massacre in Sydney has left Jews around the world shaken and grieving. This act is far more than a heinous crime: It is a regression to darker times, when Jewish visibility itself carried mortal risk.
The commandment of Hanukkah is not simply to light candles, but to light them publicly – pirsumei nisa, the publicizing of the miracle. The point is not private consolation, but shared visibility. Jewish survival, the tradition teaches, is not meant to occur behind closed doors, but in full view.
Historically, however, it rarely did. In exile, Jews learned caution. The Talmud records how, in times of danger, the candles are to be moved indoors – lit discreetly, shielded from hostile eyes. This was not a theological revision but a concession to reality: When the public sphere is unsafe, Jewish life retreats into the private domain. For most of our history, this was our reality.
Modern democracies promised something different. Jews would no longer have to choose between safety and visibility. We could light openly again – on windowsills, in public squares, in front of city halls – because the surrounding society would protect us not merely by law, but by norm. Antisemitism would not just be illegal, it would be unthinkable.
The Sydney massacre, alongside countless incidents in societies Jews have long trusted, forces us to ask whether that promise is still being kept.
Jewish safety in the diaspora does not rest primarily on police presence or intelligence services – necessary though they are. It rests on something more fragile and more fundamental: a public culture in which Jews are not merely tolerated but embraced; in which antisemitism is not merely condemned after the fact but rejected instinctively and unequivocally as a violation of the moral order.
When Jews are attacked for being Jews, and the response is muted, conditional, or delayed, the message is unmistakable. Jews may still live here, but only quietly.
That is why the response to Sydney must not be withdrawal, but the exact opposite. We cannot and will not retreat into hiding our light. The call of this moment is simple and urgent: Light candles everywhere.
Jewish communities and organizations must orchestrate public Hanukkah candle lightings in the central squares of democratic cities across Europe, across the English-speaking world, wherever Jews live under the protection of free societies. Not hidden ceremonies. Not fenced-off gatherings on the margins. But civic events, hosted openly and proudly, with the participation of local and national leaders – and of fellow non-Jewish citizens.
This is not unprecedented. Every year, a Hanukkah menorah is lit at the White House. The symbolism is powerful precisely because it is mundane: Jewish light belongs at the heart of the civic space, not as an exception, not as an act of charity, but as a matter of course. That model should now be replicated widely.
Israeli diplomatic missions, together with local Jewish organizations, should work actively with municipalities and governments to make these public lightings happen – not merely as acts of Jewish resilience, but as declarations of democratic commitment. Because this is not only a Jewish question.
A society in which Jews feel compelled to hide their symbols is a society already retreating from its own values. Antisemitism is never a stand-alone phenomenon; it is the canary in the democratic coal mine. Where Jews are unsafe, pluralism is already fraying.
Lighting candles in public squares will not undo the horror of Sydney. But it will answer it – not with fear, and not with silence, but with a refusal to normalize xenophobia, antisemitism, and Jewish invisibility.
The ancient question of Hanukkah – where we light – has returned as a modern moral test of democratic societies and leaders worldwide. Where Jewish light is extinguished, democracy itself is cast into shadow. If it can still be lit openly, with the full backing of the societies Jews call home, then the promise of democratic life remains alive.
Our light must not hide. Not now. Never again.
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Australia shooting terrifies Jews worldwide — and strengthens the case for Israel
If the shooters who targeted Jews on a beach in Australia while they were celebrating Hanukkah thought their cowardly act would turn the world against Israel, they were exactly wrong: Randomly killing people at a holiday festival in Sydney makes the case for Israel.
The world wants Jews to disown Israel over Gaza, but bad actors keep proving why Jews worldwide feel such an intense need to have a Jewish state.
Think about it. The vast majority of Jews who settled in Israel went there because they felt they had nowhere else to go. To call the modern state “the ingathering of exiles” softpedals reality and tells only half the story. The ingathering was a result of an outpouring of hate and violence.
Attacking Jews is the best way to rationalize Zionism.
Judaism’s holidays are often (humorously) summarized as, “They tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat.” Zionism is simply, “They tried to kill us, they failed, let’s move.”
Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, didn’t have a religious or even a tribal bone in his body. He would have been happy to stay in Vienna writing light plays and eating sacher torte. But bearing witness to the rise of antisemitism, he saw the Land of Israel as the European Jew’s best option.
The Eastern European pogroms, the Holocaust, the massacre of Jews in Iraq in 1941 — seven years before the State of Israel was founded — the attacks on Jews throughout the Middle East after Israel’s founding, the oppression of Jews in the former Soviet Union — these were what sent Jews to Israel.
How many Australians are thinking the same way this dark morning?
There’s a lot to worry about in Israel. It is, statistically, more dangerous to be Jewish there than anywhere else in the world. But most Jews would rather take their chances on a state created to protect them, instead of one that just keeps promising it will – especially when the government turns a blind eye to antisemitic incitement and refuses to crack down on violent protests, as Australia has.
“For over a year we have seen racist mobs impeding on the rights and freedoms of ordinary Australians. We have been locked out of parts of our cities because the police could not ensure our safety. Students have been told to stay away from campuses. We have been locked down in synagogues,” Alex Ryvchin, the co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, wrote a year ago, after the firebombing attack on a Melbourne synagogue.
Since then a childcare centre in Sydney’s east was set alight by vandals, cars were firebombed, two Australian nurses threatened to kill Jewish patients, to name a few antisemitic incidents. There were 1,654 antisemitic incidents logged in Australia from October 2024 to September 2025 — in a country with about 117,000 Jews.
“The most dangerous thing about terrorism is the over-reaction to it,” the philosopher Yuval Noah Harari said. He was talking about the invasion of Iraq after 9/11, the crackdown on civil liberties and legitimate protest. But surely it’s equally dangerous to underreact to terrorism and terrorist rhetoric.
Israel’s destruction of Gaza following the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023 led to worldwide protests, which is understandable, if not central to why tensions have escalated.
But condemning civilian casualties and calling for Palestinian self-determination — something many Jews support — too often crosses into calls for destroying Israel, demonizing Israelis and their Jews. That’s how Jews heard the phrase “globalize the intifada” — as a justification for the indiscriminate violence against civilians.
When they took issue with protesters cosplaying as Hamas and justifying the Oct. 7 massacre, that’s what they meant. And look at what happened in Bondi Beach, they weren’t wrong. Violence leads to violence, and so does support for violence.
Chabad, which hosted the Hanukkah celebration in Sydney, has always leaned toward a more open door policy with less apparent security than other Jewish institutions. But one of the reasons it has been so effective at outreach has also made it an easy target.
As a result of the Bondi shooting, Chabad will likely increase security, as will synagogues around the world. Jewish institutions will think hard about publicly advertising their events. Law enforcement and public officials will, thankfully, step up protection, at least for a while. These are all the predictable result of an attack that, given the unchecked antisemitic rhetoric and weak responses to previous antisemitic incidents, was all but inevitable.
It’s not inevitable that Australian Jews would now move to Israel, no more than it would have been for Pittsburgh’s Jewish community to uproot itself and move to Tel Aviv after the 2018 Tree of Life massacre. That didn’t happen, because ultimately the risk still doesn’t justify it.
But these shootings, and the constant drip of violent rhetoric, vandalism and confrontation raise a question: If you want to kill Jews in Israel, and you kill them outside Israel, where, exactly, are we supposed to go?
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These are the victims of the Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration shooting in Sydney
(JTA) — A local rabbi, a Holocaust survivor and a 12-year-old girl are among those killed during the shooting attack Sunday on a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney, Australia.
Here’s what we know about the 11 people murdered in the attack, which took place at a popular beachside playground where more than 1,000 people had congregated to celebrate the first night of the holiday, as well as about those injured.
This story will be updated.
Eli Schlanger, rabbi and father of five
Schlanger was the Chabad emissary in charge of Chabad of Bondi, which had organized the event. He had grown up in England but moved to Sydney 18 years ago, where he was raising his five children with his wife Chaya. Their youngest was born just two months ago.
In addition to leading community events through Chabad of Bondi, Schlanger worked with Jewish prisoners in Australian prisons. “He flew all around the state, to go visit different people in jail, literally at his own expense,” Mendy Litzman, a Sydney Jew who responded as a medic to the attack, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Last year, amid a surge in antisemitic incidents in Australia, Schlanger posted a video of himself dancing and celebrating Hanukkah, promoting lighting menorahs as “the best response to antisemitism.”
The best response to antisemitism. Happy Chanukah! pic.twitter.com/33RSGYzhUY
— Rabbi Eli Schlanger (@SchlangerEli) December 17, 2024
Two months before his murder, he published an open letter to Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese urging him to rescind his “act of betrayal” of the Jewish people. The letter was published on Facebook the same day, Sept. 21, that Albanese announced he would unilaterally recognize an independent Palestinian state.
Alex Kleytman, Holocaust survivor originally from Ukraine
Kleytman had come to the Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration annually for years, his wife Larisa told The Australian. She said he was protecting her when he was shot. The couple, married for six decades, has two children and 11 grandchildren.
The Australia reported that Kleytman was a Holocaust survivor who had passed World War II living with his family in Siberia.
12-year-old girl
Alex Ryvchin, co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, told CNN that a friend “lost his 12-year-old daughter, who succumbed to her wounds in hospital.” The girl’s name was not immediately released.
Dozens of people were injured
- Yossi Lazaroff, the Chabad rabbi at Texas A&M University, said his son had been shot while running the event for Chabad of Bondi. “Please say Psalms 20 & 21 for my son, Rabbi Leibel Lazaroff, יהודה לייב בן מאניא who was shot in a terrorist attack at a Chanukah event he was running for Chabad of Bondi in Sydney, Australia,” he tweeted.
- Yaakov “Yanky” Super, 24, was on duty for Hatzalah at the event when he was shot in the back, Litzman said. “He started screaming on his radio that he needs back up, he was shot. I heard it and I responded to the scene. I was the closest backup. I was one of the first medical people on the scene,” Litzman said. He added, “We just went into action and saved a lot of lives, including one of our own.”
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