"Fire, Ice, Air" is a short memoir by Rabbi Simcha Shafran, who was born in a Polish shtetl, attended the Novardhok yeshiva in Bialystok as a teenager, spent the years of World War II in Siberia and served as a congregational rabbi in Baltimore for over half a century. Rabbi Shafran still serves as one in a smaller way (Sabbath services take place in his home weekly) and is the administrator of the Baltimore Bais Din, or religious court. He has inspired countless people who know him personally, and continues to do so today. His son, Rabbi Avi Shafran, persuaded him to put his memories into...

A man of African and Native American ancestry would seem an unlikely candidate for conversion to Judaism ? especially for becoming an observant Orthodox Jew. And Abel Gomes wouldn't ever have struck anyone as a radical or unpredictable person. On the contrary, he has always been thoughtful, calm, intelligent and focused, not someone given to rash decisions or susceptible to mystical compulsions.
Abel's determination to become a Jew emerged slowly, nurtured by a relentless logic that led him to regard his Catholic upbringing with intellectual discomfort ? and by his marriage to a Jewish...