“My parents were old hippies,” said Felicia Park-Rogers, who grew up in the Bay Area. “They were very suspicious of organized religion and anything else smacking of authority.”
When Park-Rogers, 35, met Rachel Timoner, her partner-to-be, in San Francisco in the early 1990s, she was thrilled to be falling in love but suspicious of her new lover’s involvement with Judaism.
Timoner was raised in a Reform community in Miami. Although the lavish bar and bat mitzvahs at her parents’ shul had turned her off, she still felt drawn to Jewish spiritual life. When she found a Renewal synagogue in San Francisco, the seed of her faith began to take root.
“And she began to drag me to holiday services,” Park-Rogers said.
The couple’s once-in-a-blue-moon joint appearances at shul evolved into a weekly return engagement at Shabbat. Then, about a decade ago, Timoner was out of town during the High Holidays, and Park-Rogers found herself with a decision to make.
“I went to Kol Nidre and Yom Kippur services on my own,” Park-Rogers recalled. “After that experience, I said, ‘I have my own relationship to this.'”
Park-Rogers finished her conversion about four and a half years ago, just before she gave birth to Benjamin, her first son. She and Timoner now have a second son, Eitan, who just celebrated his first birthday.
Same-sex couples confront the same choices that are issues for most straight couples. To live together or not to live together? To marry — or at least to formalize a partnership — or not to marry? To have kids or to have a second house in Palm Springs?
Spiritual decision-making is also frequently a factor in the calculus of gay life. In fact, finding a religious tradition that affirms gay experience and offers the support of a vibrant community can be one of the most important aspects of self-realization for gay men and lesbians — especially for people who see being in a committed relationship as a natural extension of their spiritual lives.
That kind of deep introspection led Ron Paler, a 40-year-old pathologist, to convert to Judaism five years ago. Mike Loya, Paler’s partner for more than a decade, will finish his own conversion in the next couple of months.
 Mike Loya and Ron Paler.<br />
</small><br />
Paler, who grew up in a Roman Catholic family in suburban Detroit, always felt a connection to elements of Jewish tradition. </p>
<p>“My dad’s best friends were Jewish,” he said. “Each year there were interfamily celebrations on the big holidays. As a kid, I was always moved by my Passover experiences. Those memories were really formative for me.”</p>
<p>As a young adult, Paler had a hard time finding a sense of connection in Roman Catholicism.<br />
“I was missing something,” he said. “I never felt I could express myself within the church, and there was no room for discussion.”</p>
<p>Paler’s spiritual hunger eventually led him to Congregation Kol Ami in West Hollywood, where his faith finally began to blossom.</p>
<p>“I asked a lot of questions,” Paler said. “And I found my questions were welcome. In Catholicism, questioning isn’t valued, but in Judaism, questioning is intrinsic to the tradition.”</p>
<p>That openness to inquiry is equally important to Park-Rogers. </p>
<p>“In my Intro to Judaism class, the teacher told us, ‘It’s not important that you believe in God, but if you did believe in God, it’s important that you’d believe there’s only one,'” she said. “That’s still amazing to me. It leaves open a lot of paths to explore and gives you plenty of room to grow.”</p>
<p>Exploration and growth have been the hallmarks of the life Arlan Wareham and David Fyffe have made for themselves. When the 50-something men met in 1996, David had been a Jew-by-choice for 15 years, and Arlan, who was raised in the Seventh-day Adventist community in Loma Linda, was just beginning his foray into Judaism.</p>
<p>Soon after the couple took a trip to Israel in early 2004, they began to talk about making aliyah.</p>
<p>“At first the idea sounded crazy,” Wareham said. “But the more we talked, the less crazy it sounded.”</p>
<p>Both men had lost their parents by that time, and with no other ties binding them to the United States, they moved into a house in a small development outside of Tsfat in summer 2005.</p>
<p>“It’s like a dream,” Wareham said. “On a clear day we can see Mount Hermon to the north and in wintertime there are beautiful cows grazing in the field across the road.”</p>
<p>The consequences of their proximity to the Lebanese border have not been so dreamlike. During last summer’s conflict, two Katyusha rockets landed in their neighborhood, shattering windows and spraying shrapnel. No one was seriously hurt by the explosions, and the ardor of the two men is undiminished by their experience.</p>
<p>
“When we walk into our synagogue for prayers, we’re often the ones who make a minyan,” Fyffe said. “We’re really contributing something to our community. I feel our move here is the completion of something very important for both of us.”</p>
<p>That deep sense of fulfillment threads through the conversion stories of all three couples. Park-Rogers is now executive director of Beth Chayim Chadashim, and her partner,Timoner, is a third-year rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.</p>
<p>“We’re all up in it,” Park-Rogers said.</p>
<p>Although she’s now “all up in” just the kind of institution that tended to arouse suspicion in her counterculture parents, Park-Rogers believes she hasn’t forgotten the important lessons they taught her.</p>
<p>“You can be a very active Jew and still have a very active critique of Judaism,” she said. “In that respect, it’s all coming together for me. My parents didn’t use the words ‘Torah’ or ‘tzedakah,’ but those were the values they gave me.”</p>
<p>For Paler, the sense of fulfillment has come as he has reached beyond the Roman Catholicism of his childhood to begin to explore his family’s Eastern European roots. “I was telling my rabbi [Denise Eger at Kol Ami] about the fact that the ancestry of one of my grandfathers is sort of a family mystery,” Paler said. “When I told her I think there’s a Jewish connection there, she said, ‘Jewish souls eventually find their way home.’ That’s definitely been my experience. I really do feel like I’ve come home.” </p>
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