Today, Ariel Levin lives in Beit El, near Ramallah, with his wife, Talia, and three of their six children. Their journey to Israel, he says, was less about becoming someone new than finally reaching the place they had always belonged.
For much of his life, Ariel considered himself Jewish. He grew up helping Jewish families escape the Soviet bloc, served nearly two decades in the British Army and built a family with his wife, who was born Jewish.
Yet it was only when his son Ezekiel asked a deceptively simple question that Ariel began to consider how his family could become more connected to Judaism.
"Dad, you've always told us that you're Jewish," said Ezekiel. "Why have you never taken us to a synagogue?"
The question, Ariel recalled, was "like a punch to the gut."
"I was like, 'Oh, that's a really good question.' And you know what? I can't answer that."
It was the beginning of a journey that would force Ariel to confront the difference between the identity he had carried since childhood and his status under Jewish law.
Growing up in Colchester, Essex, Ariel watched his father, Frederick Wright devote his life to helping Jews immigrate to Israel. Frederick, a former British Army intelligence officer with doctorates in history and theology, later became a church minister. While reading the biblical book of Jeremiah, he encountered a passage he interpreted as a call for non-Jews to help bring the Jewish people home.
"He basically quit the church and said, 'Well, I've got to do that, because that's what it says in the Bible to do,'" Ariel said.
In the late 1980s, Frederick took his family through Eastern Europe to find Jews who wanted to make aliyah. He would approach strangers in Warsaw asking where he could find Jews who wanted to move to Israel. Ariel stressed that his father's work was never about converting Jews but rather about helping bring them to the Land of Israel, which he saw as his mission.
Ariel was only eight or nine when he helped out on a farm being used as a halfway house for Jews preparing to make aliyah. He recalled accompanying his father on an operation to help a Jewish family leave Poland and reach the Israeli Embassy in West Berlin.
"My father said, 'I've got some Jews.' And they went, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'I've got these Jews. They're originally from Ukraine. I found them in Poland and they want to go to Israel.'"
Instead of spending school holidays at European resorts, Ariel travelled through Poland, Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. His family was in Poland during the Solidarity movement and in Berlin the night the Wall fell.
"We were in Berlin the night the Wall came down," he said. "It was incredible."
Frederick has since been involved in helping more than 317,000 people make aliyah.
Ariel's own identity was shaped by his maternal family. His grandfather, William, had undergone a brit milah at eight days old but grew up Protestant in Northern Ireland. Ariel understood his Jewish ancestry to mean he was Jewish, and by his early teens had begun questioning Christianity.
"I always understood that we had Jews in the family, ergo, I'm Jewish," he said.
"I was the only kid in my school who went, 'Well, I'm Jewish,'" he added.
Ariel left home at 16 to join the British Army, serving close to 20 years in the regular and reserve forces. At times, he faced challenges due to his Jewish identity. At a church parade while he was in the army, he once refused to join either the Protestant or Catholic group, insisting that he was Jewish.
Through his father's work with Jewish communities in the former Soviet Union, Ariel met Talia, a young woman from Kyiv. They married after just three months together and, 27 years later, have six children. Talia herself didn't know she was Jewish until her mother passed away about eight years ago.
The couple had always intended to make aliyah eventually, but were not in a hurry. The turning point came during the COVID-19 pandemic. Worried about his father's safety while Ariel worked as a close-protection officer, Ezekiel found a prayer book in his father's office and began praying. His question about synagogue attendance made Ariel realize that he had passed on a Jewish identity to his children without giving them a way to practice it.
Around this time, a former school friend who had become religiously observant happened to reach out to him. When Ariel told him about his interest in learning more about Judaism, his friend suggested he contact Rabbi Mendy Singer from Bristol. Despite the COVID lockdown, Singer made a special effort to travel to Hereford on a Friday morning to meet the family and guide them.
The following day, Ariel accompanied the rabbi to synagogue. When he first stood before the Torah, he experienced a powerful connection.
"I just remember looking at this most beautiful thing that I'd ever seen in my life," he said. "And I felt like it was alive, like it was vibrating in front of me."
After several visits to the synagogue and conversations with the rabbi, Singer explained that, according to Jewish law, Ariel was not Jewish and would need to undergo conversion.
"I remember being so angry, like on fire angry," Ariel said. "I'd been living this life that I believed is who I am for 30 years. I've been persecuted for being a Jew. I've lost work because of my stance on antisemitism. Who are you to tell me I'm not Jewish?"
Ariel initially refused and stopped speaking to the rabbi for months. Eventually, Talia encouraged him to visit Manchester to explore the Jewish community and schools for their children. He set conditions he assumed would make the move impossible: they needed school places and a home before the new school year began, just days away.
Instead, they found a school willing to accept the children and a house that could be ready within a week. Although reluctant to uproot his life, Ariel realized that leaving Manchester did not feel right.
"We've left the Jewish community in Manchester, and my chest feels empty," he recalled telling his wife. "And I don't like it. So let's go and see what happens."
He quit his job, sold his car and moved his family to Manchester. After six months of waiting, they began an 18-month conversion program involving 600 hours of private study and regular synagogue attendance. The Manchester Jewish community helped them navigate religious practice and schooling.
Ariel, Talia and three of their children completed their conversion in the first week of September 2023. Their eldest daughter, a nurse who had already left home, chose not to convert, while their two older sons remain interested.
A month later, Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, prompting the family to reconsider when they would make aliyah. Their daughter Phoebe had recently spent several months in Israel on a Bnei Akiva trip and had fallen in love with the country. The family had expected to make aliyah eventually, perhaps after the children finished school, but their children's response to the attacks was decisive.
"What are you waiting for? We should be there now. That's our people."
Ariel agreed. "You're right. I can't argue with that."
After the required waiting period following conversion, Ariel, his wife, and their three youngest children made aliyah in August 2024. The couple's three older children still live in England.
A few months later, Ariel attended a Shabbat dinner in Petah Tikva at the home of a Ukrainian family. The father had made aliyah in the early 1990s. Ariel asked whether he had travelled by bus to Odessa and then by boat to Haifa. The man's face turned white.
"How do you know that?" he asked.
Ariel explained that his father had helped people make that exact journey. In May, he arranged for his parents to meet the family - the first time Frederick had met a family he had helped bring to Israel.
For Ariel in, his journey to Judaism and to Israel was about resolving a lifelong tension between who he believed himself to be and what Jewish law required of him.
"I don't call conversion, conversion," he said. "I call it coming home."
"There's a term that is used for converts, which is Jews by choice. I don't particularly like it because I believe that a sincere convert doesn't have a choice," Ariel said. "I think it's your neshama that pulls you in."
Looking back on his experience, he said: "You have the highest of highs and lowest of lows through it all and I would do it all over again in a heart beat."
