Between Faith and Community: The Choice of Christianity by the FSU Immigrant Adolescents in Israel

The recent immigration wave from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) brought to Israel a large group of about 300,000 immigrants who are either not Jewish (i.e., people of different nationalities married to Jews), or partly Jewish (i.e., children of inter-ethnic marriages) who are not recognized as Jewish according to the Halakha1. Thus, when this multi-ethnic collective of partly Jewish and non-Jewish immigrants relocates into the local institutional and ideological reality, religion could become one of the major resources for immigrants ’ incorporation into the dominant majority (i.e., conversion into Judaism), or it could facilitate an intensive search for alternative sources of identification and belonging (i.e., affiliation with Christianity). Hence, the present study aimed at examining the process of religious identity construction of the non-Jewish immigrant youngsters who, being irreligious prior to immigration, choose to affiliate themselves with Christianity after arrival in Israel. Moreover, because participation in the organized religious community plays an important role in the immigrants ’ adaptation and their identity formation (see e.g. Cao, 2005; Chong, 1998), we compared immigrant adolescents who activel