The first time Avner Paula ever spoke to a rabbi, he had to take two tranquilizers to calm his nerves. “When I was a boy, my mother told me that if I ever spoke about being Jewish outside of our home, I could be persecuted or killed,” explains Avner, 43, a student at Ohr Torah Stone’s Susan and David Wilstein Conversion Institute. “So although I studied about Judaism for many years on my own, I was afraid to have anything to do with the Jewish community.”

Avner was born in Mozambique to a family of anusim (crypto-Jews), who hid their connection to Judaism while nevertheless practicing some Jewish customs. “In our house, we didn’t eat the same food that Christians ate but no one ever told me why,” Avner recalls. “ I used to help my great-grandmother slaughter chickens, and she taught me a whole set of rules for how to do it. But when I saw her praying, and asked what she was doing, she would send me away. And once, when she found me reading the Jewish bible, she got very frightened and told me that people would burn the book, and me along with it. Like other anusim, she had never experienced religious persecution, but was raised to have terrible fears about revealing her Jewish heritage.”

When Avner was a teenager, his mother told him – only once – that he was Jewish, but stressed that he should not talk about it to anyone. The family moved to Portugal and Avner began searching for information about their strange customs. After finally working up enough courage to approach the Jewish community, Avner began attending classes at the synagogue in Lisbon. There, he met Rabbi Boaz Pash, a graduate of the Joseph Straus Rabbinical Seminary’s Amiel Program serving the community. Rabbi Pash directed him to the OTS Conversion Institute for the conversion process that would ensure his halachic acceptance into the Jewish community.

“Avner is such an enthusiastic student, and he has learned so much that he has already received approval from the rabbinical court for undergoing the conversion process,” reports Renana Birnbaum, director of the Institute. As he continues to study at OTS and awaits the final stages of conversion, Avner expresses his plans to settle permanently in Israel, study cantorial music and find a job in his field – ecological agriculture and forestry. He is eager for his mother to join him in Israel, although she remains wary of living in an openly Jewish society. “I’m taking it one step at a time,” Avner smiles.

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