I was born in 1955 in Chicago. My family moved to California when I was six. My father was an architect. My mother was a homemaker and later a teacher. I had three younger sisters. We moved into a new house in the hilly part of Beverly Hills. I went to Hawthorne Elementary School and later Beverly Hills High School. We attended Wilshire Boulevard Temple, which was the leading Reform synagogue in L.A. at the time. Later we switched to Temple Emanuel in Beverly Hills. I attended Hebrew School and Bar Mitzvah training there. I had my Bar Mitzvah there. The Torah portion, on which I gave a short homily, was the account in Genesis where Esau sold his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of stew.

After my Bar Mitzvah, my parents sent me to Israel with the Ulpan program sponsored by the Jewish Community Center. I spent the summer at a Moshav -- Meyer Shfeyah -- near Haifa. During the week we worked on the Moshav and studied Hebrew. On the weekends we toured. One weekend I spent with relatives living in a Kibbutz near Jerusalem. I learned recently that their son, who was a young child when I was in Israel, was killed while serving in the Israeli military. One day during that summer, I prayed to God on a hillside from the Sidur (prayer book). I view that as perhaps my first attempt to reach out for some sort of personal relationship with God.

During my senior year of High School I became more interested in spiritual things. I wanted to know the Truth or Ultimate Reality. I dabbled in the teachings of eastern/Hindu gurus and adopted some of their views. During my first year in college at U.C. Santa Cruz, I became even more serious about finding God (though I did not think of God as a person). I meditated and became a vegetarian, thinking that somehow these practices might bring me closer to God. But I was frustrated in my efforts. The harder I tried, the more I realized that I did not know the truth, and that I was less holy ( sinful in fact) than I thought I needed to be to find that truth.

Finally, in frustration, I prayed to God. I was sitting on the floor of my dormitory room at College V at U.C.S.C. I told God that I did not know the truth and that I did not know what I had done wrong. I asked him to reveal his truth to me.

A short time later I found myself reading the New Testament in the Catholic ( New English) Bible that was an assigned text in a comparative religions class I was taking. While reading the accounts of the life of Jesus in the gospels, I sensed God's presence. This occurred each time I read the New Testament. I began to view Jesus as more than a great religious teacher, but as the Savior.

Later that year, I met some other followers of Messiah, who helped me understand the gospel more clearly. John Weldon was a Christian author who picked me up hitch-hiking and took me to a bookstore where I was able to buy a bible that showed, by way of cross-references between the Old and New Testaments, that Jesus/Yeshua had fulfilled the predictions of Moses and the Prophets concerning the Messiah. John helped me to understand that Yeshua had died on the cross to pay for my sins and that he had risen from the dead. My own study of the predictions concerning the Messiah and their fulfillment in the live of Yeshua led me to a firm conviction that He is the Messiah of Israel, the Savior of the world.

Since then, I have continued to study the Bible and follow the Messiah. I married Miriam, a Jewish woman who had come to Yeshua as I had. We now have four children, each of whom has come to believe in Yeshua as Messiah. We continue to affirm our identity as Jews -- physical descendants of Abraham through Isaac and Jacob, by, among other things, observing the Passover in our home.