The following is an article from USA Today:

When Hannah Brandt needs help with her Hebrew homework, she knows better than to ask her dad. He grew up in a congregation in Atlanta, where the rabbi didn’t believe in learning the language.

Hannah, by contrast, goes to the Akiva Day School in Nashville, Tenn., where Hebrew is on the curriculum, along with math, reading and the other core subjects.

“She already speaks it better than I do,” Steve Brandt said proudly.

The Brandts adopted Hannah, 7, from China in 2005, and her education as a Jew is important to them. When Jewish families adopt from overseas or across racial lines, their children not only become part of a new family and a new culture, they’re typically expected to embrace a new faith. About 5% of American Jewish families have adopted children, according to the National Jewish Population Survey, collected by the United Jewish Communities and the Jewish Federation system. That’s higher than the national average of 3.7% for all Americans.

How the adopted children become Jewish varies from family to family.

Teri Sogol, an adoption social worker with Jewish Family Services in Nashville, said adoptive parents have to think through all the issues involved in adoption. The organization works with about 30 families a year, and talks with them about instilling a sense of pride in the child’s heritage while also raising them in the faith.

“The process of identity formation is very complex,” she said.

That’s true whether a child was adopted overseas or in the United States.

Jennifer Bleyer and her husband adopted two boys through Jewish Family Service as infants. The boys are 2 and 4, one African-American, the other part Korean-American. The Bleyers talk about what being Jewish means. Unlike their friends, they don’t have a Christmas tree. That’s all right with the boys, Bleyer said.

“They love Hanukkah,” she said. “They hated to see it end.”

Hannah became Jewish not long after the Brandts returned home from China. They’d planned to have her named at a ceremony in Atlanta, at Steve Brandt’s parents’ synagogue. But the rabbi there insisted that she be converted first, a ceremony that included being immersed in a ritual bath called a mikveh.

The Brandts balked.

“She wasn’t practicing another faith,” said Steve Brandt, a hematologist who teaches at Vanderbilt. “She didn’t need to be converted.”

Other families choose a more traditional approach.

Amy and Michael Ritchart adopted their daughter Elana Mei in July. They recently had a conversion ceremony for her so she could practice any form of the faith she chose later in life, including those that require the ceremony.

Amy Ritchart put on her bathing suit and took Mei into the mikveh while the rabbi recited a series of prayers.

“She went under three times and then we celebrated,” said Ritchart, a former reporter for the Leaf Chronicle in Clarksville, Tenn.

The ceremony is a kind of spiritual rebirth, said Rabbi Philip “Flip” Rice of Congregation Micah in Brentwood, Tenn.

“We basically convert them to Judaism,” he said. “It’s a child, so it is not of their own will, but they are brought up in the Jewish faith.”

Rice said his congregation often holds a naming ceremony for adopted children during a service, so the whole community can take part. Bringing children from other countries into the Jewish community is a good thing, he said.

“Saying ‘Funny, you don’t look Jewish’ has taken on a whole new meaning,” he said.

(Source: USA Today)