Fifteen months ago, a Korean American woman, Angela Buchdahl was named Senior

Fifteen months ago, a Korean American woman, Angela Buchdahl was named Senior Rabbi of Manhattan’s Central Synagogue in a unanimous vote by the synagogue’s Board of Trustees.

She is the first Asian-American senior rabbi of one of the North America’s largest ( 2400 families) Reform synagogues.

Born in South Korea in 1972 to an American Jewish father and a Korean Buddhist Mother, Rabbi Buchdahl exemplifies the new, ethnically diverse face of the worldwide Jewish community.

The Jewish People now includes between 300-500,000 non-Jews who have become Jewish; formally by conversion or informally by acculturation into the Jewish people and its culture.

If their children are added in; the number of Jews with recent non-Jewish ancestors is 1-2 million out of only 13 million Jews worldwide.

Chinese American Reform Rabbi Jacqueline Mates-Muchin is the associate rabbi of the thousand family members of Temple Sinai in Oakland, California.

“I’m a Jewish mother, and so was my mother,” the rabbi said, noting that her mother converted before marriage, and she and her sister grew up in San Francisco’s Reform Congregation Shearith Israel.

A large percentage of these ‘new Jews’, even those from Asia and Africa, are descendants of a previous Jewish ancestor who was cut off from the Jewish people by converting or marrying out of the Jewish community..

Sometimes those who are returning only learn about their Jewish ancestor after they become Jewish.

The souls of Jews whose children have been cut off from the Jewish people, either through assimilation, persecution or conversion to another religion, will reincarnate as one of their own ‘no longer Jewish’ descendants.

These souls, two to seven generations later, will seek to return to the Jewish people. A majority of people who end up converting (or reverting) to Judaism and the Jewish people have Jewish souls from one of their own ancestors.

Every human on earth has 8 great grandparents and 16 great great grandparents. Each of these 24 individuals contributes an equal amount of genetic material to their descendants. Nevertheless, brothers or sisters who share the same 24 ancestors do not have identical genomes.

Unless they are identical twins their physical, mental and personality traits always differ, sometimes greatly, from siblings who share the same physical genetic heritage.

http://www.eurasiareview.com/15032014-two-asian-american-rabbis-change-face-jewry-oped/