WASHINGTON (JTA) — Ivanka Trump said her father, Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, was fully supportive of her conversion to Judaism.
“My father was very supportive,” she said at a CNN town hall meeting featuring the presidential candidate and his family broadcast Tuesday evening. “He knows me. He knows and he trusts my judgment. When I make decisions, I make them in a well-reasoned way. I don’t rush into things.
Ivanka Trump, who works for her real estate magnate father’s corporation, had an Orthodox conversion before marrying Jared Kushner, the scion of another real estate family.
“I appreciate the support [my father] gave me because obviously these decisions are not taken lightly,” Ivanka Trump said, replying to a question from Joseph Cohen, a law student at Columbia University.
“And it would have been much more hard if I had had headwinds, but he believes in me,” she said. “He loves my husband. They’re incredibly close, which I think was obviously helpful. And he has been very supportive of me in that decision, as in many others that I’ve taken throughout the years.”
Kushner has been the Trump campaign’s main point man to the Jewish community, and he helped shape the candidate’s well-received speech last month to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
The candidates on both the Republican and Democratic slates are focusing on their messaging to the Jewish community ahead of the April 19 New York state primary.
CNN is having town hall meetings this week for each of the three Republican presidential candidates and their families.
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