(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 final decision was hers.

So, she stepped into the mikvah, a ritual bath, and chanted blessings that sealed her commitment to God, the Torah and its teachings.

On Thursday (May 21), like millions of Jews around the world, Bloom will celebrate the spring festival of Shavuot, which commemorates the pivotal moment in the Jewish story when God gave the Torah to the Israelites at Mount Sinai, offering a covenant of protection and intimacy, alongside the responsibility of commandments. It’s the culmination seven weeks after Passover that represents spiritual liberation through God’s laws and teachings, after the Israelites’ physical liberation from slavery in Egypt.

For many converts, or “Jews by choice” like Bloom, Shavuot resonates deeply.

“If you’re born Jewish, you’re Jewish no matter how observant you are,” Bloom said. Born in China, Bloom was adopted by an American Jewish mother and Catholic father. “But if you’re like me, as an adoptee, I actively chose it.”

Synagogues commonly read from the Book of Ruth, whose heroine is widely regarded as Judaism’s first convert and is admired for her courage and faith.

“It presents one form of conversion — loving a particular Jew and, through that, coming to love Judaism,” said Hannah D’Alessandro, a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School who converted at age 22 and affiliates with the Jewish Renewal movement. “That’s beautiful, but it’s also just a single one of many paths people take into Jewish life.”

Rabbi Mira Rivera of the Conservative movement said, “Each person who comes into Judaism has a journey with twists and turns,” referring to her own story of growing up in the Philippines, becoming Jewish and later uncovering her maternal grandmother’s hidden Sephardic roots. “Looking back, it all comes into focus.”

This year Rivera is leading a lecture at the Manhattan Jewish Community Center’s Tikkun Leil Shavuot, a traditional all-night Torah study session. Other customs vary widely across communities. Many Sephardi Jews read the Ketubah le-Shavuot, a symbolic marriage contract between God and the Jewish people, while Ashkenazi congregations recite the Akdamut, an Aramaic liturgical poem, before the public reading of the Ten Commandments.

In the U.S., Judaism is seeing unprecedented rates of conversion. Communities are increasingly diverse. Roughly 1 in 7 U.S. Jews are converts, and 1 in 5 U.S. Jews are people of color, multiracial or first- and second-generation immigrants.

Since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in Israel, the Israel-Hamas war and the subsequent rise in anti-Jewish incidents worldwide, some rabbis and conversion programs report continued rising interest in conversion despite fears about safety.

Akiva Nachman, a musician, producer and father of six, said Judaism felt like a calling long before he converted.

Born LaDerryl Hart in Detroit, Nachman toured professionally with artists including Missy Elliott and first visited Israel during Elliott’s tour in 2010. He recalls being drawn to the spiritual and historical depth of Jerusalem’s Old City.

Nachman and his family converted to Orthodox Judaism in Irvine, California, and launched the “House of Lev,” an online platform for content about faith, education and lifestyle.

As a musician and producer, Nachman made hip-hop, R&B and pop tracks for decades. Since his conversion, he said he’s continued making music with “the same feel I was raised on,” but with a “sense of holiness” in his content about Torah, Chassidic mysticism and Nachman’s love for Israel, where his family moved in 2024.

“As a parent now, raising Jewish children, Shavuot hits differently, because the faith that me and my wife searched for so long is now the inheritance of my children,” Nachman said.

The conversion process took the family roughly two and a half years. Nachman described it as emotionally difficult but deeply rewarding.

“One of the reasons Hashem gave us the Torah was so we could be a light to the world,” he said. “Shavuot is about receiving the Torah again and again, learning how to live it and use it to make the world better.”

Conversion has held a complicated place throughout Jewish history. In some ancient periods it was common. After the destruction of the Second Temple and the spread of Christianity across Europe and Islam across the Middle East and North Africa, conversion to Judaism often became dangerous and illegal. Public conversion to Judaism only became possible after late 18th-century Jewish emancipation in Europe and subsequent Jewish immigration to the United States.

After the Holocaust devastated the global Jewish population, the postwar decades were nonetheless described by some as a “golden age” of Jewish life in America. In 2026, Jewish conversions continue to increase amid what many see as an uncertain landscape.

Rabbi Phil Kaplan, of Stony Brook University’s Hebrew Congregation, said he relates to converts and the challenges they might face because he himself became religious later in life as a baal teshuva — someone raised secularly Jewish who later embraced observance.

Kaplan works with the New York-based conversion program Project Ruth – which is web-based and has welcomed students from across America and countries as far-flung as India, China, Germany and Turkey. Kaplan said though sometimes Jewish communities don’t know what to make of converts who want to join them, “it should be an affirmation that what we have is valuable and compelling, that people would give things up to take on this life.”

Jewish communities and converts also debate the language surrounding their experiences. Some embrace terms such as “convert” or “Jew by choice.” Others feel those labels fail to capture a deeper spiritual significance.

Bobby Apperson, a New York-based digital strategist originally from Corpus Christi, Texas, said he dislikes the word “conversion” because “it implies you were never Jewish,” Apperson said. “Legally, I wasn’t. But my soul always was.”

Bloom said she prefers the phrase “affirmation” of Jewishness because of her exposure to her adoptive mother’s Judaism growing up.

Rabbi Moshe Webber of Base Logan Square in Chicago, himself a convert, said he identifies most strongly with the Hebrew term “ger,” often understood as “stranger,” “proselyte” or “sojourner.”

Akhila Raju, a business student and tech professional born into a secular Hindu family in Dallas-Fort Worth, said Ruth’s story resonates with her for another reason.

“I think it’s really powerful that Ruth becomes the ancestor of King David,” she said. “Every Jew can relate to an ancestor who is a convert. I love the line ‘where your people go, I will go.’”

Raju, who has documented her Jewish life and conversion to Orthodox Judaism online after moving first to the United Kingdom and later to Israel, said Judaism’s resilience inspired her.

“The Jewish community is incredibly loving,” she said. “It’s a religion that survived thousands of years of persecution and oppression, and I think that says something about the beauty and strength of the Jewish people and the truth of the Torah.”