In 1787, Lord George Gordon changed his name to Yisrael Bar Avraham Gordon and converted to Judaism. The British politician, who had incited the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots in London seven years before, spent the last few years of his life in Newgate Prison.
This conversion seemed to have mellowed him out from being the man who revolted against the Papists Act, as he started living his life according to strict halachic rules, donating to charity and playing the violin for other prisoners. Gordon also insisted upon only seeing male Jewish visitors if they had beards and covered their heads beforehand.
The reasons for Gordon’s conversion are still unclear, but he was not treated kindly for it at the time. One of his most famous depictions is from an antisemitic print that shows him being bitten by a dog. Despite the backlash he faced, on top of the additional condemnation for his previous actions, historian John Cannon describes Gordon’s time in prison post-conversion as “perhaps the happiest period of his life.”
It is not uncommon for convicts to embrace their religion or convert to another one while serving out a sentence. According to Pew Research Center, approximately seven out of 10 prison chaplains state that inmates attempting to convert others is a common phenomenon, though it is worth noting that the chaplains interviewed for the study were largely Christian. The article “Jailhouse Religion, Spiritual Transformation, and Long-Term Change” by Byron Johnson notes that many inmates who convert to Christianity do so in order to reform themselves.
Prisons also boast a high rate of conversion to Islam, often due to the controversial Nation of Islam’s efforts to advocate for prisoners’ rights. A 2019 report from civil rights organization Muslim Advocates found that 9% of state prisoners are Muslim, compared to 1% of the general population.
But stories of Jewish conversion in prison — or of Jewish inmates embracing their religion while incarcerated — are relatively rare. There are some cases of Israeli prisoners doing so, as chronicled in the study “Becoming Sincere: Why Do Jewish Inmates in Israeli Prisons Embrace Religion?” by Michael Morag and Elly Telman. In the U.S., however, convicts do not often convert to Judaism.
It’s easy to intuit why this might be: The neo-Nazi Aryan Brotherhood is the largest prison gang in the country, with the Southern Poverty Law Center estimating that they boast more than 20,000 members. While prisoners of color and specifically Black prisoners are the targets for most of their abuse, their ties to white supremacist ideology and love affair with Nazi imagery might be enough to make any Jewish inmate keep quiet about their religion.
Rabbi Eli Ostrozynski, a Jewish chaplain at the Connecticut Department of Correction, noted that part of the reason Jewish conversion in prison is rare is because the Jewish conversion process is purposefully difficult. Traditionally, a prospective convert must be rejected three times before they are allowed to begin the process.
“As a Jewish adherent, we’re also not meant to proselytize,” he explained. “Not only because of the legal aspect of not being allowed to proselytize in prison, but because Judaism discourages it. I also find that the duress of being in a prison setting doesn’t allow a person the same freedom of choice to make these decisions.”
As a result, many of the convicts who convert to Judaism do so after they are released.
Ostrozynski added that Jewish thought takes a different approach to the issue of punitive measures than other Abrahamic religions do, which can prove attractive to inmates.
“In Judaism, we don’t find prison to be a form of punishment,” he added. “Jewish rabbis of the past and present have written about how punishment shouldn’t be punitive, and that we should focus on preventative measures rather than just incarcerating people. Our real focus is to be corrective.”
As rare as it is, though, Jewish conversion after prison does happen, and there are many ex-convicts with stories far more recent than Gordon’s.
One of the most famous stories is that of rapper Shyne, who was charged with assault in 1999 following a shooting at a nightclub he was attending with his producer, Sean “Diddy” Combs.
Shyne was sentenced to 10 years in prison, during which he released several albums and developed an interest in Orthodox Judaism. He had already been looking into the religion before he was arrested, as his grandmother had roots in the Beta Israel (Jewish Ethiopian) community.
In 2006, Shyne changed his name to Moses Michael Levi Barrow, and moved to Jerusalem soon after he was released from prison in 2010. “My entire life screams that I have a Jewish neshama,” he said in a 2010 New York Times interview.
He now lives in his home country of Belize and serves as its leader of the opposition, representing the conservative Belize United Democratic Party.
Another story of prison conversion is that of David Ben Moshe, a coach and public speaker who lives in Be’er Sheva in Israel. Ben Moshe grew up in rural Maryland, raised by fundamentalist Christian parents, but he never felt comfortable with the religion.
“I grew up in a majority-white area, so I always felt different and disconnected,” he recalled. “[My parents’] faith was very important to them, but it didn’t sit right with me in some ways. And they really valued education, but I was always a poor student. That led to a lot of disconnect and friction.”
Ben Moshe served 30 months in prison for selling drugs and firearms. He had no interest in Judaism before he was sentenced, but an experience with another inmate changed that. He said that he was in the prison’s library during a lockdown period. He started wandering around, as he was restless and unable to leave, and encountered an inmate who was in the library studying the Torah.
“He told me that it’s not clear what anything [in the Torah] means, so they have these arguments and discussions and that’s how you traditionally study it. And that blew my mind,” Ben Moshe said. “The way I thought of religion growing up was that Christianity told you, ‘This is what this means, and that’s the only thing it means.’ Meanwhile, the Torah had all these conversations right on the page.”
Ben Moshe formally converted after his release, later moving to Israel and studying at the Pardes Institute as a social justice fellow. But converting to Orthodox Judaism did not solve all of his problems. Upon moving to Israel and marrying his wife, Ben Moshe became embroiled in a five-year battle for Israeli citizenship, which he was continually denied due to his convert status. This led to him engaging in an eight-day hunger strike in front of the Ministry of the Interior.
Ben Moshe’s story landed him on the cover of the Times of Jerusalem, and he was granted Israeli citizenship in January 2023.
“The beauty that especially observant forms of Judaism have in building connection and community are just absolutely incredible,” he added. “The way it helps me integrate into a community, like make close friendships, find support systems, deal with important heartbreak and life cycle events, find good role models … everything about it is incredible.”
