A Chinese Celebrity’s Conversion to Judaism

Growing up in Communist China, Hong Zheng was not familiar with any religion, nor had she ever met a Jew. She’d heard about Jews as a nation. “Chinese people usually have a good impression of the Jewish people,” she says. “They believe that Jews are very good with money.” But she didn’t even know that Jews had their own religion.

When Hong was a teenager, the communist leader Mao Zedong died. His replacement, Deng Xiaoping, was more tolerant towards religion. The only religion easily available to Hong’s family in China was Buddhism.

Spiritual by nature, Hong was drawn to Buddhism. She recalls, “I believed that there was a Superpower in charge of the world and Buddhism offered that.” But she was confused about why Buddhism had so many gods. Why was it necessary to turn to one god for help with fertility and another god for help with finances? “I felt that something was off,” she says. “A country cannot have two kings – that would be chaos. Imagine a world with more than one king!”

Though not fully satisfied with her spiritual life, Hong was very successful professionally. She had graduated university as a registered nurse but found that she did not enjoy western medicine, which was too much about memorization and too little about intuition. Instead, she found a job at the university’s radio station.

After receiving many compliments for her professional “radio voice,” Hong decided to enter a TV show host contest. She won first prize and embarked on a TV career, hosting TV shows, producing her own original shows, and broadcasting daily news. Fed up with the communist nature of Chinese TV shows and the need to know the “right people,” Hong switched to investigative reporting. She enjoyed analyzing various subjects, asking complex questions and getting to the bottom of the subject at hand. She received many awards for her work. Her fame grew and she became a household name in China.

Journey to America

Nevertheless, due to personal and professional challenges, after 13 years in the TV world, Hong decided she needed a break. She signed up for an international conference on freedom of press which was going to take place in Duke University in North Carolina.

This was Hong’s first time in America, and at the time, she did not speak English fluently. The conference organizers hired a Chinese translator for her. “I didn’t feel good about that because I was supposed to represent China,” she says. Hong decided to spend the next six months learning English so she would no longer need translation services at her next conference.

Hong had come to the U.S. on the J-1 exchange scholar visa that was only good for six months. To renew her visa, she had to sign up for another conference. Providentially, the conference she signed up for was about freedom of religion at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.

While Hong studied English and waited for the second conference to begin, a friend introduced her to a Christian minister named Moses. This was Hong’s first encounter with a Christian religious leader and when the minister invited her and her friend over for dinner, she was fascinated to learn about Christianity.

Moses, in turn, was impressed with Hong’s knowledge of Buddhism. They discussed both religions for hours and at the end, Moses said to her, “You are a very spiritual person. God is calling you, but you believe in the wrong god.”

The minister’s words stirred the investigative reporter in Hong, and she decided that she needed to learn more about Christianity and investigate which religion was true.

Moses gave Hong a Bible with a Chinese translation, and she began her investigation.

She prayed to the one God that she knew ruled the world, even though she wasn’t sure at that point who He was, and she asked Him for guidance. “I had faith that He would show me the right direction,” she recalls.

Investigating Religions

She opened the Bible in a random place. “I was shocked,” she says. “The first sentence I read said, ‘You came from the east.’ Then I was shocked again when I read, ‘But you bow down to idols.’ It was true – I was bowing down every night, 108 times, full body on the floor.” The bowing down is a Buddhist tradition which Hong had practiced for years.

“This is speaking directly to me,” Hong said to herself. “Does this mean Moses was right? Was I believing in the wrong god all this time?”

She continued reading the Bible and came back to Moses with a list of questions. But Moses couldn’t provide Hong with satisfactory answers.

“So I read more,” she says, “and the more I read the more I felt that the Old Testament made so much sense.”

The New Testament, on the other hand, didn’t meet her strict journalistic standards. For example, Hong read that the Christian messiah claimant had many followers but people in his own hometown did not follow him.

“If you want to investigate about something, you go to the source,” she says. “That’s what I do. I’d investigate from the very bottom all the way up. No matter how you fancy yourself, you can say I’m so and so, but when you go to your hometown, they know who you are. That’s why they didn’t believe him. They didn’t follow him because they knew exactly who he was.”

Hong was also bothered by the fact that, according to the Old Testament, the messiah was supposed to be a descendant of King David, but the New Testament claimed that he was the son of God. He couldn’t possibly be both at the same time.

Then Hong learned that Christianity didn’t really become popular until hundreds of years after the supposed messiah’s death. That fact also raised her suspicions as an investigative journalist. “My conclusion was that it was just a story,” she says.

Having ruled out Christianity, Hong looked into other major religions, such as Islam. It did not meet her journalistic standards either.

The Old Testament, on the other hand, continued to draw her in. She found more depth to it than any other religious text. She knew that it was much older than the New Testament and that it has never changed. In response to her many questions, Moses had told her that the Old Testament came from Judaism, which is “the mother of all religions.” Hong wanted to learn more about Jews and Judaism.

She read about the ancestry of the Jewish people in the Bible. She was impressed that Jews could trace their lineage all the way to the beginning of history. She also learned that the burial places of Jewish forefathers and foremothers are known and visited to this day.

In the Bible, Hong read that whoever blessed the Jewish people would be blessed and whoever cursed them would be cursed. That corresponded to the Chinese perception of Jews. “Throughout history, Jews have been successful in everything they touched,” she thought to herself. “God blesses the Jewish people.” The nations that have given Jews shelter throughout the exile have prospered while those that persecuted the Jews have disappeared.

And she was also intrigued by Judaism’s unique claim that the entire nation heard God speak directly, as opposed to other religions that required a leap of faith in accepting the claim that a single prophet heard God speak.

“The more I investigated Judaism, the more I was blown away,” she says.

Hong eventually concluded that the Old Testament was not just a story book but a book that documented history. The people described in the Old Testament impressed her as genuinely holy. She felt that she wanted to become one of the chosen people and have a share of that holiness.

She says, “If I was going to pursue something, I might as well do it right. So I decided to convert to Judaism.”

The Road to Conversion

At that point, Hong had never been to a synagogue and had not met religious Jews. Her decision to convert stemmed purely from her intellectual quest.

Hong’s friends, including some secular Jews, had tried to dissuade her. They told her that Judaism has too many restrictions and leads to a miserable life. But for Hong, it was a matter of principle. She wasn’t looking for an easy life. She was pursuing truth.

Hong’s first step was keeping kosher. She didn’t know exactly what that entailed but she knew that religious Jews didn’t eat pork, so she decided to become a vegetarian. “If this is what it takes,” she said to herself, “I’ll see if I can do it.”

She recalls, “I lived in the downtown Flushing Chinese community, and there, the smells from Chinese cooking are all over. And I can’t deny that the food is delicious! It was not easy but I could do it! I asked myself if I would be able to do it for the rest of my life and decided that I could.”

Hong’s next step was keeping Shabbat. Just like with kosher, she did not know what that entailed, so did the safest thing – she stayed in her apartment the whole Shabbat and didn’t eat any hot food. After several weeks, she said to herself, “This is really hard! But can I do it for the rest of my life? Yes, I can.”

After reassuring herself that living an observant Jewish life was doable Hong decided that it was time to speak to a rabbi.

She’d never met a rabbi before and didn’t know where to find one. “I looked around,” she recalls. “There was a synagogue just across from the Chinese radio station. It was a beautiful large synagogue with a big Star of David and stained-glass windows. I walked in and said to the rabbi, ‘I would like to convert to Judaism.’ The rabbi said, ‘Wonderful!’ He received me very warmly, made a phone call, arranged for me to contact a school in Manhattan. But I just felt that something was off. I’d heard that Jews don’t really encourage you to convert. On the contrary, they might try to slow you down.”

On her way out, Hong asked the rabbi if he kept Shabbat and kosher. The rabbi told her that he drives to synagogue on Shabbat. “I politely said thank you,” says Hong, “but in my heart I turned that down. I had a good life in China that I could go back to any time. Why would I choose such a hard life if I wanted to do things superficially? What was the point?” She wanted to practice Judaism in the most authentic way.

In Search for a Rabbi

Hong was not sure where to turn to next. On the way to work, she noticed a building where people coming in and out looked visibly Jewish. She decided to go there.

When she walked in, she saw two teenage boys and asked them if she could speak to the rabbi. They went to check, then came back and told her that the rabbi wasn’t in. Hong asked for the rabbi’s phone number. They told her that the rabbi didn’t have a phone.

Hong thought to herself, “Now I’ve come to the right place. They’re trying to push me off.”

She told the boys that she would come at a different time and was about to leave when young adult men walked in and asked the boys what the visitor wanted.

Hong spoke up. “I’m interested in Judaism.”

The men laughed in her face. “It broke my heart,” Hong recalls. “I walked out with tears in my eyes. I was so embarrassed. I had gathered all my courage, came to a strange place, spoke in my broken English, and they just laughed at me.”

Hong says that today, she doesn’t blame the young men. She found out later that the building was a boys’ yeshiva, and the boys were not used to strangers walking in and inquiring about conversion.

But at the time, she began to doubt her decision to convert. Then she thought to herself, “What if this is a test? There is an easy way, but you don’t want them. And this is the real deal, and they don’t want you. Let me try one more time.”

Hong got into her reporter mode. She took a tape recorder, went to the main street of the Jewish neighborhood, and began interviewing Jewish women about their lifestyle.

One of the women spoke to her for some time and then asked Hong why she was asking all those questions. Hong admitted that she wanted to convert to Judaism but didn’t know how.

“Because of the interview, we built up some trust,” says Hong. The woman offered to help. She made some phone calls and put Hong in touch with Rabbi Meir Fund, who dealt with Orthodox conversions in Brooklyn.

Hong met with Rabbi Fund. “We spoke for over an hour,” she recalls. “After he heard what I had to say, he said, ‘Sounds like you’re very serious. Where do you live?’”

When Rabbi Fund heard that Hong lived in Queens, he recommended she meet Rabbi Peretz Steinberg. Rabbi Steinberg helped Hong with her conversion and continues to be her rabbi. He also suggested that Hong meet other conversion candidates.

Through him, Hong got in touch with an Italian American woman who was in the conversion process. They decided to meet at a synagogue in Queens.

When Hong walked into the synagogue, she heard the beautiful singing and burst into tears. This was her first time in an Orthodox synagogue and she finally felt that she’d come home. Until then, Hong’s conversion journey had been purely intellectual but now, her emotions got fully on board.

Hong threw herself into learning Hebrew and the basics of Judaism. As she learned the Torah with the traditional commentaries, she was even more impressed and moved by the text that had originally drew her to Judaism. She also felt that God was guiding her on her path. “My life is full of miracles,” she says.

For example, when she began keeping Shabbat, Hong lost two jobs, one after another. She was disappointed and unsure how she would make it in America all on her own, but she continued studying for conversion.

A few days after she converted, Hong got a job in a Jewish-owned Shabbat observant company, which paid better than her previous jobs had. Her boss even offered to give her a ride to work every day. She says, “God was telling me, ‘I know what you gave up. I’ll make it up to you.’”

Hong had also given up her whole TV career. She knew that once she became Jewish, she would no longer live in China where Jews were few and far between. A precondition for her conversion was moving into a Jewish neighborhood and joining a synagogue. She had decided that she would stay in America, improve her English, and get into a different line of work.

Staying in America was not so simple. China did not necessarily want to give up its prominent award-winning investigative journalist. Hong had to get a special permission from the Chinese government, which she eventually received thanks to her connections.

Because of her sincere commitment and dedication, Hong managed to complete her conversion within six months.

Upon converting, she chose the Hebrew name Esther Tiferes.

The Jewish Dating World

After her conversion, Esther began receiving invitations to speak at different synagogues. She is always happy to share her story.

At the same time, many well-meaning people began setting her up with Jewish men, but their attempts were not successful. Chinese converts don’t have an easy time in the Jewish dating scene.

Esther decided to approach dating just as she did everything else – directly and honestly. She posted her profile on a Jewish dating site and wrote, “I am a Chinese convert. If that bothers you, don’t waste your time.”

Esther’s future husband, Haim Tebeka, appreciated her directness. He contacted her, and the rest is history. They have now been married for over two decades and have three children.

A Jewish Grandfather

Decades after her conversion, Esther got a surprising glimpse of her family history. Growing up, she didn’t know much about her grandfathers. Both of them were unjustly accused and murdered by the communist regime. It was a stain on the family name, and no one ever spoke about them.

Recently, an old acquaintance mentioned to Esther’s father that his father, Esther’s paternal grandfather, had been Jewish. It was a shock to the whole family, but looking back, it made sense: Esther’s father is tall and has wavy hair, which is not the typical Chinese look.

Esther’s grandfather had been accused of spying for America because he worked as a general manager of an American bank and spoke four languages: Chinese, Japanese, English, and German. At the time, few people in China spoke German. Now Esther wonders if perhaps the fourth language was actually Yiddish.

The Chinese government did not keep any records, and all attempts to research Esther’s family’s history and learn more about her grandfather were futile. But it’s comforting for her to know that perhaps by practicing Judaism and raising Jewish children, she is continuing in her grandfather’s footsteps.

Today, Esther Tebeka lives in Las Vegas with her family and practices Chinese medicine – something she learned from her father, in addition to her conventional medical training. Her acupuncture clinic was rated top in Las Vegas. She finds fulfillment in helping people heal and live healthier lives and does not miss her TV career. Esther continues speaking at Jewish events, inspiring others with her story.