Please note that the posts on The Blogs are contributed by third parties. The opinions, facts and any media content in them are presented solely by the authors, and neither The Times of Israel nor its partners assume any responsibility for them. Please contact us in case of abuse. In case of abuse, The Abayudaya are Ugandan Jews. They have practiced Judaism for 100 years. They began to practice normative Judaism in the 1930s, influenced by a European Jew who taught them about Jewish practices as they were observed by Jews around the world. As the Abayudaya became more aware of the world Jewish community, they wanted to fully legitimize their membership in it. They realized that they had never formally converted to Judaism, and so they decided to do so under the auspices of recognized denominations. From 2002 until 2016, 1,600 Abayudaya converted under the aegis of the Conservative movement and 400 converted with an Orthodox bet din (religious court) supervised by Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, the chief rabbi of Efrat, Israel.