The Contexts of Religious Intensification Among American-Israeli Women Who Have Become Orthodox

The article describes the social contexts that were related to the emergence of a return to Orthodox Judaism (teshuvah) on the part of Jewish American women who now live in Israel. The qualitative study presented here included individual interviews with 14 mothers who lived in the U.S. and their 14 religious daughters. The study found that the return to Judaism of the American women interviewed came out of a process in which their predisposing individual characteristics interacted with experiences in their families of origin, Jewish educational programs or camps, sibling and other family relationships, peer relationships, and Israel. Their religious journeys were gradual and cumulative, but there were turning points when the women experienced divine providence in their lives. The religious daughters had predisposing individual characteristics that opened them to teshuvah. Their mothers described them as intelligent, capable, independent women, searchers who questioned the status quo and were seeking a meaningful life. Their independence enabled them to break with the pattern of their families of origin.