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Originally Posted By Sharon

A lot depends on where you are adopting from. In some foreign orphanages, there isn't a great deal of religious instruction. As an example, I doubt that most of the older kids in Chinese orphanages have had religious teaching.

So many things will be new and different to such a child that religion will be just one of them. The child will soon come to understand the way you run your household (e.g., celebrating Shabbat, keeping Kosher, or whatever) and view it as part of having a family.

You will need to make some decisions, of course, about conversion. While some liberal Jews do say that conversion isn't necessary since you are the child's parents and committed to raising him/her Jewish, most Jewish people view it as necessary. For a girl, this will simply involve a trip to a mikvah and then, perhaps, a naming ceremony. For a boy, of course, there is circumcision, not just mikvah, and that's a little more difficult to explain to a newly adopted child.