By Rabbi Yair Hoffman It was the spring of 1948.  A Catholic priest named Father Kenneth Cox walked into the office of Rabbi Israel Brodie, senior Jewish chaplain of the British Army.  Father Cox had an extraordinary request. After serving ten years in the priesthood, Father Cox wanted to become a Ger. This meeting would mark the beginning of one of the most remarkable religious transformations of the twentieth century. Born in 1911 to a wealthy London family, Kenneth Cox had already undergone one profound religious conversion. Raised Anglican and nicknamed “parson” by his schoolmates for his religious fervor, he had converted to Catholicism in his twenties. By 1943, he was an ordained Catholic priest serving a parish in Stirling, Scotland. Yet beneath his priestly collar, a spiritual storm was brewing. The catalyst for his crisis of faith came through an unexpected source: the scholarly works of Hebrew University Professor Joseph Klausner. Reading Klausner’s books “Yeshu of Nazareth” and “From Yeshu to Paul,” Father Cox found his foundational beliefs shaken. Klausner portrayed Yeshu as thoroughly Jewish, not divine, and suggested that Paul, not Yeshu, was Christianity’s true founder. For Cox, who had long felt an inexplicable attraction to Judaism and Jewish people, these revelations proved transformative. But the path from Catholic priest to Orthodox Jew would prove far more challenging than his earlier conversion to Catholicism. When Rabbi Brodie heard Cox’s request, his response was not the warm welcome Cox had received from the Catholic Church years earlier. Instead, he warned of serious problems and difficulties ahead. The London Beit Din (rabbinical court) responded to Cox’s initial letter with stark brevity: “Write again in six months.” When Cox did write back, exactly six months later, the rabbis’ skepticism remained. The Beis Din demanded he find employment in a Jewish environment to prove his capability to live as a Jew. The conversion process would take at least two years, they said, and he would need to master Hebrew, Halacha, and essential Jewish Hashkafos. As Cox later wrote, “I was in a heartbreaking position. I had left everything behind to enter the Jewish community, yet here I was, compelled to live without its consolations and suspended in a vacuum, as it were, neither Christian nor Jew.” The physical demands of conversion proved equally challenging. His Bris Milah, performed with incomplete anesthesia at his own insistence because he wanted to fully experience the mitzvah, was followed by complications that would affect him for the rest of his life. He often spoke of this ordeal to his students, seeing it as a testament to his commitment to his new faith. Finally, in 1953, after five years of study and testing, the London Beit Din declared Cox’s Geirus valid. He took the name Avraham, after the first convert to Judaism, and Carmel, from England’s Carmel College where he had begun teaching. Yet even this moment of triumph came with its share of isolation. As he later wrote, “In September of 1953, I had already joined myself to the faith and people of Israel through the rite of circumcision, and I doubt whether the first man to land on the moon could have felt more isolated or utterly alone.” Carmel found his first real home in Jewish education. At Carmel College, “the Anglo-Jewish Eton,” he taught […]