I stood alone on the pavement, suitcase in hand, staring at the closed door of my house. As far I was concerned, my home was gone forever.

So begins Shira Yehudit Djalilmand’s riveting story of her life, a story which begins in a small, dusty manufacturing town in the West Midlands of England and takes us on a tumultuous journey through her rebellious teenhood to her wanderings in Morocco, across the Spanish countryside, and eventually to a kibbutz in the Negev. Searching desperately for some meaning to her existence, this Christian-born young woman wrestles with the deepest questions of mankind and nearly despairs of finding the answers that would bring peace to her tortured soul. When she finally finds that peace, her questions fall away in the face of the enormity of the gift she’d been given…the gift of Torah and Judaism.

Rebel with a Cause, by talented and popular Mishpacha writer Shira Yehudit Djalilmand, is an eye-opening, gut-wrenching memoir, amazing in its honesty and in its author’s quest for truth.