They converted to Judaism in Colombia. Why won’t Israel let them make aliyah?
The documentary ‘Torah Tropical’ shows the struggle of Latin American converts to be accepted by the broader Jewish community.
Beit David, a community of emerging Jews in Cali, Colombia, perform a Torah service. Courtesy of ThisTopia
Ezra Axelrod and his husband David Restrepo founded their production company ThisTopia in 2021 to tell stories about political, social and cultural changes in Colombia. They quickly found the exact sort of story they were looking for when their friend, photographer Heidi Paster, showed them a photo essay she had published in The Washington Post on Colombian evangelicals who had converted to Judaism.
“We were like, wow, this is right in line with what we’re wanting to do,” Axelrod told me in a Zoom interview I did with him and Restrepo. “This is really provocative material straight from the barrios of our city, Cali.”
This sparked the creation of Torah Tropical, a documentary that follows a family of Colombian converts to Orthodox Judaism – also known as judíos emergentes (“emerging Jews” in Spanish) – trying to emigrate to Israel.
Axelrod and Restrepo ended up focusing on the family of Isska Dvash, the subject in one of Paster’s photos. The film shows how integral Judaism is to the lives of Isska, her husband Menajem Aguirre, and their two young daughters. We follow their day to day: listening to Jewish music, studying scripture, practicing Hebrew, all the while, Isska pursues a Jewish music career and Menajem writes a Sefer Torah. The family also dreams daily of a life in Israel.
Their deep sense of faith compels them to fulfill the ultimate mitzvot of making aliyah. Menajem explains in the film that without carrying out this commandment, it feels hard to be a “whole Jew.” He also does not want to miss the coming of the Messiah.
Restrepo told me that, in part, evangelicals feel that Judaism gives them a more direct relationship to the Torah and God that does not need to be mediated by a cleric. Axelrod also said Judaism provided the community with a blueprint for talking about social issues such as gender, substance abuse, and sexuality. At one point, the community invited Axelrod into their minyan, but not before considering the Torah’s approach to having queer people included.
“I grew up in a rural, western small town that was full of evangelical Christians,” Axelrod told me. “And it wasn’t a tolerant environment at all. And so to meet people who were from a similar kind of religious vein to be so open-minded, I think what I started to realize is that open-mindedness was something that they found that they could express more within Judaism.”
However, as Torah Tropical shows, the openness that draws emergentes to Judaism is not always practiced by the Jewish community.
Israeli religious authorities do not accept the legitimacy of most emergentes’ conversions, preventing emerging Jews from making aliyah. Even within Colombia, Axelrod told me, traditional synagogues often reject these converts. Emerging Jews have started their own communities in Colombia in response, although this comes with its own sets of challenges. We see in the film how Isska and Menajem’s community Beit David struggles to regularly form a minyan from a relatively small population of Jews.
Helped by an ally within Israel, Isska and Menajem come up with a plan to pretend to be tourists and undergo another conversion in Israel, allowing them to stay. Ironically, to stake their claim to the Jewish homeland, they have to shed their Jewish identity entirely, ditching their yarmulkes, headscarves, and prayer books before their trip.
The lengths to which their family must go to make aliyah makes one question why some converts must jump through more hoops than others to gain legitimacy as Jews. While the film never addresses the issue of race, it seems clear that it plays a role. At one point, the family discusses having to go to Miami to be converted by an American rabbi, because they believe that conversion is more likely to be accepted in Israel. The family’s struggle to find acceptance in Israel is reminiscent of how other non-white Jewish communities, such as those in Ethiopia and Uganda, have faced challenges when making aliyah.
Early in the film, Isska says her conversion will allow her to be welcomed into Israel with open arms. She anticipates joining the Jewish community as “being freed from…a lost society where we don’t matter, where we’re invisible.” Unfortunately, their interactions with the mainstream Jewish community do not uplift them in the way one would hope. Without giving too much away, I will say that their immigration does not go according to plan.
Torah Tropical focuses on the experience of one family and therefore does not deeply explore many of the issues at the core of the story: race in the Jewish community, debates over what groups are legitimate Jews, how the broader Jewish community treats converts, and how all these problems complicate – and are complicated by – the idea of a Promised Land for all Jews. The film also does not probe deeply into the history of Judaism in Colombia.
Still, it is a beautifully shot, incredibly engaging, and moving story about the quest for belonging, shown through the lens of a unique and complicated intersection of identities.
“Torah Tropical is exactly the kind of stories we want to be telling where the protagonists are very different from us as viewers,” Axelrod said. “They challenge our stereotypes and they get us to think in a more complex way about all of these conflicts that we’re embroiled in in the world right now.”
Torah Tropical will be playing at the 34th New York Jewish Film Festival on Monday, January 20th at 3:30pm.
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism so that we can be prepared for whatever news 2025 brings.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
