Gate of Return: Homecoming of a Jewish Soul - Paperback

by Alma Rutgers (Author)

Alma Rutgers took an unlikely but deliberate path to her Jewish faith.

Her paternal grandfather was a Dutch Reformed minister and theologian, and her maternal forebears were influential members of the Church of Christ. But Alma-born to wealthy parents in New York City-felt a pull toward Jewish things from a very early age. She recalls her childhood discovery of a Jewish cemetery in the woods near her Greenwich family home and feeling inexplicably drawn to the Hebrew lettering on the gravestones.

This memoir is the story of Alma's journey to her Jewish spiritual home. Milestones include a Reform Jewish conversion in her thirties and an Orthodox conversion on her sixtieth birthday-but it's her fearless, clear-eyed inquiry into religious and political history and her own spiritual life that give her story extraordinary depth and resonance.

The memoir also offers an inspiring and penetrating examination of what it means to be guided by a Jewish moral compass in a post-October 7 world.