JMN Boston hosted a wonderful Chanukah party in Boston for over 90 people on December 11, 2011.  Funded by a $1,000 Innovation Grant from Combined Jewish Philanthropies, a vibrant team of local JMN’ers (some long-term, some brand new) organized the event in partnership with Temple Israel, the largest synagogue in the area.

Before the party, we made a significant outreach effort, sending a beautiful flyer (thank you, volunteer graphic artist Nicky McCatty!) to synagogues, Jewish day schools, secular Jewish organizations, Hillels, parents’ list serves, etc. with a cover letter asking for help identifying folks who might be interested.  The event was listed or better yet featured on various web sites, including Jewish Boston and Interfaithfamily.com.

At the party, there were a variety of activities for people of all ages.  We had a “Human Bingo” game where we got to know each other by asking questions about our backgrounds and life experiences.  Children drew pictures of their families on a mural titled, “My Jewish Family,” and engaged in Chanukah-themed art projects.  Adults were invited to join facilitated discussions about the future of JMN Boston, and exploring synagogue membership.  We had the JMN poster displayed, and enjoyed some sufganiyot (Dunkin’ Donuts style – this was Boston after all!).  We played the multicultural CD, “Songs in the Key of Hanukkah.”

Everyone formed a big circle at the end for singing and closing words. Everyone was asked to fill in a detailed sign-in form so we could gather information about the participants and stay in touch.

The night after the event, a young adult who had attended sent me this message, “THANK YOU SO MUCH for planning the event and welcoming me into the circle…I felt right at home.  It was the first time I’ve ever experienced being with so many Jews of Color.  It was the first time I ever felt like I belonged in a Jewish group at all.”  If just one person had that experience, it was a true success.

We’re looking  forward to our next steps as we build our local JMN chapter.

~Becky Shuster, JMN member & leader

JWeekly.com

Dawn Kepler tells the story as a cautionary tale.

It’s about a little girl of Chinese-Jewish ancestry, raised Jewish in the Bay Area. One day an older woman approaches the child in synagogue and tells her, with every good intention, “You’re always welcome here.”

As if she wouldn’t be?

That sort of subtle insensitivity to Jews of color bothers Kepler a great deal. That’s why she has organized a free lecture series on the subject of Jewish diversity, “What Color are Jews?” Sponsored by Lehrhaus Judaica, the once-a-month series will start Oct. 23 and run through March 2012 at Temple Sinai in Oakland.

Rabbi Jacqueline Mates-Muchin of Temple Sinai, who is of Chinese descent, will join a discussion on Asian Jews. The first panel will be on Asian Jews, and by that Kepler doesn’t mean Jews living in Shanghai or Mumbai. She’s means Oakland, San Francisco and Palo Alto.

“If you think of Jews of color, you think exotic foreign Jews, not the person sitting next to you in shul,” Kepler said. “Since I started on this project, many people suggested a lecture on Jews of Uganda. I said no. I want to talk about the Jew sitting next to you who is black and Jewish.”

That, too, will be the topic for one of the series’ panel discussions. The list of other topics includes: Jews from Argentina (led by Argentine- born Rabbi Roberto Graetz of Lafayette’s Temple Isaiah); how multi-racial Jews develop their Jewish identity; and the demographics of the Jewish community of the future.

Founder of Building Jewish Bridges, a Berkeley nonprofit that reaches out to interfaith families, Kepler says the impetus for the series came out of personal experience.

“I have my own relatives and friends who are multi-racial,” Kepler said. “You can hear one too many stories about people being checked at the door for their Jewish identity.”

Kepler noted that the local Jewish community is more diverse than some realize. She cited a recent demographic study that found 13 percent of East Bay Jewish families are multiracial.

“That means at least every 10th Jew is a Jew of color or in a family with a Jew in color,” she added. “So how can we be more welcoming, more sensitive?”

She hopes the series will provide some answers.

The panel on Asian Jews will feature Rabbi Jacqueline Mates-Muchin of Temple Sinai. She is of Chinese ancestry and understands the challenges of feeling part of the Jewish community when one looks different.

“I’ve had people ask if I was adopted,” the San Francisco native said. “In rabbinical school, one  woman said to me ‘You’re a nice Chinese girl. You can be just as Jewish as the rest of us.’ ”

Mates-Muchin will return to the series Nov. 13 to deliver a lecture titled “Diversity from a Biblical Perspective.”

“Some of it is pretty direct,” she said. “It is said we left Egypt ‘in a mixed multitude.’ So right from the start, the early laws talk about the stranger in the community. We were already mixing.”

At the same time, she concedes that there are mixed messages in the text, as well as in Jewish culture.

“We have been able to be inclusive and adapt, become new people, incorporate new ideas,” she said. “That’s how we survive. Yet there’s a feeling within the text that we are hesitant to want to change. It’s a constant tension.”

Kepler wants to see some of that tension surface in the series’ panel discussions. She wants the sessions to be safe places for attendees to ask what she calls “awkward questions.”

The conversations, she hopes, will help move the Jewish community toward being 100 percent accepting.

“We’re all flawed,” she said. “We’re all on this journey together. Generally in the Bay Area we all embrace the idea that the Jewish community is very diverse. Now let’s do a better job of it.”

“What Color are Jews? Exploring the Diversity of Our Community Locally and Globally” starts Oct. 23 and ends March 28, 2012 at Temple Sinai, 2808 Summit St., Oakland. Seven sessions. Free. Information: (510) 845-6420 or http://www.bit.ly/odnLhx.

Reporting from Jerusalem and Beijing— As a child growing up in Kaifeng in central China, Jin Jin was constantly reminded of her unusual heritage.

“We weren’t supposed to eat pork, our graves were different from other people, and we had a mezuza on our door,” said the 25-year-old, referring to the prayer scroll affixed to doorways of Jewish homes.

Her father told her of a faraway land called Israel that he said was her rightful home, she recalls. But “we didn’t know anything about daily prayers or the weekly reading of the Torah.”

Jin has since fulfilled her father’s dream. On a hot summer day in Jerusalem, where she works as a tour guide for Chinese citizens visiting Israel, Jin, who now goes by the Hebrew name Yecholya, wore a long khaki skirt, indicative of her conservative religious views, and Teva-like sandals, the national footwear of Israel.

Jin and her relatives belong to a community of Chinese Jews that was established in the 9th century by Persian traders who traveled along the Silk Road to Kaifeng, at the time China’s capital.

Records documenting the group’s history are spotty, but experts do know that some of the Jewish traders settled in Kaifeng and eventually built a synagogue with official recognition from the emperor. After the last rabbi in Kaifeng died in 1809, many began to forsake their religious practices while holding on to certain traditions, like the prohibition against pork and the celebration of a communal meal on Passover.

Then in 2005, Shavei Israel arrived. The privately funded conservative religious organization, based in Jerusalem, specifically targets descendants of Jews who have lost their connection to the religion, such as those forced to convert to Catholicism during the Inquisition in Spain.

“Chinese have a strong reverence for ancestry,” said Michael Freund, founder and chairman of Shavei Israel. “Even though they don’t know how to read the Torah, they know they’re Jewish.”

So far the organization has helped 14 Jews, out of an estimated 3,000 who live in Kaifeng, move to Israel. But Freund complained that Israel’s bureaucratic and religious red tape has prevented Shavei Israel from bringing over more of these Chinese Jews.

Because the community intermarried and based Jewishness on patrilineal heritage rather than matrilineal, the norm in Judaism, Kaifeng Jews who want to move to Israel need to undergo Orthodox conversions under Israeli law.

The process takes a year or more of study at an Orthodox yeshiva, and requires a final examination before a rabbinical court.

Jin was brought to Israel with three others from her hometown by Shavei Israel specifically to begin the conversion process. Once converted, she was eligible to remain in Israel under the country’s Law of Return. The statute allows Jews to claim citizenship, which she did along with her three Chinese classmates. Jin’s father remains in China, although she said he hopes to join her soon.

At first, Jin and others were indignant about the need to formally convert to Judaism.

“According to me and my family, we were always Jewish,” she said. “I was confused why we needed to go through the conversion process.”

But after she started studying in Jerusalem, Jin said, she realized how little she knew of Jewish traditions and rules.

Jin eventually became such an expert in prayers before meals, Freund said, that she stumped him at a dinner with other Jews from Kaifeng at a kosher sushi restaurant, where they discussed which prayer should be uttered first: the one for the rice or for the fish.

“This is something that I, or most Jews for that matter, would never have given a second thought,” Freund said. “It shows how much they can add to Judaism.”

The first family of Kaifeng Jews to immigrate to Israel was almost sent back to China. Shlomo and Deena Jin (no relation to Yecholya Jin) had overstayed their tourist visas in 2005. As they faced deportation, Shavei Israel worked with authorities to allow them to stay after going through the conversion process. Shlomo, at the time in his late 40s, endured a circumcision to complete the conversion.

More recent arrivals have been in their early 20s and most have felt more at home in Israel than in Kaifeng.

Wang Yage said he stood out his whole life. His house was filled with Hebrew books, a language no one in his family understood, and even his name was different: It’s the transliterated version of Jacob, a biblical name.

After studying one year at Henan University in Kaifeng, the 25-year-old jumped at the opportunity to move to Israel. He hasn’t looked back.

“I feel Israel is my home and I’m more comfortable here,” said Wang, who now refers to himself as Yaakov. “Israelis help you out when you need it; it’s like belonging to a big family.”

After his conversion, Wang plans to become a rabbi to help Kaifeng Jews immigrate to Israel. If he succeeds, he will be the first Chinese rabbi in almost 200 years.

Despite this progress, bureaucracy in Israel and China may prevent larger-scale immigration. According to Shavei Israel, the Israeli Ministry of the Interior has been reluctant to give visas to a group not officially considered Jewish by Israel’s chief rabbinate.

Meanwhile, because Jews are not among China’s 56 officially recognized ethnic groups and Judaism is not one of the five officially recognized religions, the Chinese government is suspicious of the Kaifeng community’s efforts to organize.

“The government is still worried about religion and its negative effects,” said Xu Xin, director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at Nanjing University. “They worry it will affect stability and encourage fundamentalism.”

Ultimately, the government sees organized religion as a challenge to its power and state-sponsored atheism.

Along with a newfound freedom of religion, the 14 Kaifeng Jews are looking forward to stretching their political wings.

“The first time I went to vote, it was raining hard and three of us went together,” Jin recalled. “I was so proud. For everyone else there it was just another election, but for us, it was the beginning of a new life.”

Haas is a news assistant in The Times’ Beijing bureau.

Originally published here.

“Adoshem, Adoshem, Part I” is not your zayde’s prayer.

A reinvention of this traditional High Holy Day appeal is featured on Further Definitions of the Days of Awe, on which the multicultural musicians of the Afro-Semitic Experience merge Jewish, African and African-American genres.

The words of the prayer say exactly what you’d expect a High Holy Day prayer to express. They address the “gracious and compassionate” deity who forgives sins and grants pardon. “Adoshem” is a term used by pious Jews in place of the unspeakable name of God, combining “Adonai” (Hebrew for “my Lord”) and “shem” (name).

The start of the song sounds like a rehearsal — there are voices, piano riffs and drum beats, but you can’t tell where the song is headed. Then, the musicians gather their strength and begin. At first, the song clings to its Jewish roots, courtesy of the warm-hearted, yearning cantorial voice of Jack Mendelsohn. Yet there’s a different feel to this “Adoshem.” The pianist’s fingers roam restlessly over the keyboard with arpeggios, strike jazz- and blues-inflected chords, and play the stuttering notes of a gospel hymn — a reminder, perhaps, that sinners are stuck in their ways and need to find ways to stop sputtering and push forward.

Then, the song does indeed push forward in ways that synagogue-goers have never heard. Percussionist Baba David Coleman, a Yoruba priest from Cuba, suggested the rhythm of a tango for “Adoshem.” With that seductive beat, underlined by an insistent drummer and the melancholy thrum of a cello, the Afro-Semitic Experience creates a Latin expression of the Jewish habit of swaying, or shuckling, to connect the physical self to a higher power. Is this going too far? “Music, especially sacred music, is not static,” bass player David Chevan says. “We don’t do this in an ironic manner, but rather out of respect and joy.”

As for the “Part I” in the title, that’s a wink to the old-school rhythm-and-blues practice of having two parts of a song — one on each side of a 45 record. The first part of “Adoshem” is a reflective Latin reverie.

Originally published here.

The girls were slated to begin the school year at the “Ner Etzion” school, which only had students of Ethiopian descent. The school was closed at the instruction of Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar, following the parents’ protest, and the five students were directed by the municipality to the “Or Chaya” school, which belongs to the Chabad movement.

The girls arrived at the institution accompanied by their parents, and were met by a person at the gate who took them aside and informed them that the school was not interested in taking in Ethiopian students.

The girls were forced to return shamefacedly to the municipality. The Education Department staff called the school and was surprised to receive the same answer: “You’re welcome to lead us to the gallows. This has never happened and will never happen,” a school official said.

The Petah Tikva Municipality filed a complaint with the Education Ministry against the school, and Minister Sa’ar instructed the ministry’s director-general to summon the school principal, Nechama Dina Deitch for a hearing.

“We won’t tolerate these behavior toward children of Ethiopian descent,” Petah Tikva Municipality spokesman Hezy Hakak said Wednesday.

In the meantime, a week after the start of the school year, the five students are still sitting at home. “They looked at her as if she were a monkey,” said Molko Wanda, the father of a girl who was slated to begin the second grade at the “Or Chaya” school. “Do you know what it means telling a seven-year-old girl that she’s not wanted for being black?”

Moshe Ashgara, the father of another girl, feels helpless too. “My daughter is a diligent student. Why won’t they take her?”

Sixty-six of the “Ner Etzion” students have yet to be absorbed in an alternative educational institution. The municipality promised that a place would be found for all children within the next few days, and that a school refusing to take in students of Ethiopian descent would be punished.

The principal of “Or Chaya” school was unavailable for comment.

Originally published here.

Not according to Rabbi Capers Funnye. On Friday, Funnye, a prominent African-American rabbi from Chicago who is also the cousin of first lady Michelle Obama, delivered a message to the predominately white congregation at Temple of the Arts Shabbat services in Beverly Hills, California.

“The color of a person’s skin should not matter. It is what is in that person’s heart and in that person’s soul that matters,” Funnye told the congregants. “We are a Jewish people linked to each other not by color or racial background, but because of our belief.”

Funnye heads Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation in the Southwest side of Chicago. His synagogue has more than 200 members and services consist of prayers and biblical passages in Hebrew where sometimes worshipers break into song and sway back and forth like a gospel choir.

Funnye was once asked to address a congregation of Jews in Africa. According to the synagogue’s head rabbi, David Baron, there is a long history of Jewish people on Africa’s continent. He says that Egypt is mentioned in the Bible almost as much as the “Promised Land.”

Funnye was introduced to Judaism from an African perspective and converted to the religion in 1971 at the age of 17, after growing up in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Funnye says that Judaism is a global faith made up of people from every part of the world in every color, stripe and ethnicity.

Though Funnye believes in diversity in the religion, not too many Black rabbis exist. America’s first Black female rabbi, Alysa Stanton, was ordained just two years ago and Funnye serves as the first African-American member of the Chicago Board of Rabbis; he is also the first Black rabbi of numerous mainstream Jewish organizations.

To share story ideas with Danielle Wright, follow and tweet her at @DaniWrightTV.

Originally published here.

Wall Street Journal

KAIFENG, China—Zhang Xinwang, a moon-faced Chinese man with a spiky beard, calls himself “Moishe.”

“So do you think I look Jewish?” he asks.

For much of the past millennium, Jews in Kaifeng— descendants of merchants who arrived here from Persia, probably around the 11th century—have been struggling with an existential question: What does it mean to be Jewish?

Zhang Xinwang calls himself “Moishe.”

The handful of Kaifengers who go to Israel are sometimes floored to discover they need to go through a rabbi-certified conversion to be accepted as Jews, while the ones staying home squabble over which of them are really Jewish.

The question has surprising consequences in this dusty walled city in central China. According to the Chinese government, there are no Kaifeng Jews because there are no Chinese Jews. Judaism isn’t one of China’s five official religions and Jews aren’t designated as one of the country’s 55 official minorities. Orthodox Jews have a similar view, though for different reasons. Kaifeng Jews trace their heritage through their father, as Chinese traditionally do, while orthodox Jews define Judaism as passing through the mother.

“They may stem from Jewish ancestry, but they aren’t Jewish,” says Rabbi Shimon Freundlich, who runs the orthodox Chabad House in Beijing. “There hasn’t been a Jewish community in Kaifeng in 400 years.”

Except there is one, though it’s divided and diminished. Somewhere between 500 and 1,000 people in the city say they are descendants of Kaifeng Jews and cling to at least some Jewish traditions. A canvas poster at No. 21 Teaching the Torah Lane announces the street as the site of a synagogue that was destroyed in an 1860 flood and never rebuilt. Inside a tiny courtyard house, “Esther” Guo Yan works as a tour guide and sells knick-knacks decorated with Jewish stars.

Kaifeng’s last synagogue, destroyed in an 1860 flood, stood at “Teaching the Torah Lane,” now an alley of courtyard houses.

When tourists stop by, she quizzes them on Jewish ceremonies, like what prayers to say when lighting Sabbath candles. She says she hasn’t yet managed to fast a full day on Yom Kippur, though she is trying. As the granddaughter of a Kaifeng Jew, she says the orthodox standard on Judaism is unfair: “We read the Torah with Eastern thoughts; deal with it.”

The first Jewish merchants arrived when Kaifeng was in its heyday as the Song dynasty capital. They married the local women and rose to become mandarins and military officials. Over the centuries they blended in ethnically and were forgotten by the world until 1605, when a Jewish scholar from Kaifeng, Ai Tien, met Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci in Beijing. The missionary then spread the news that Jews had been living in China for centuries.

The Kaifeng Jewish population is thought to have peaked at around 5,000, but by the early 1900s, none could read Hebrew and the community’s Torah scrolls were sold to collectors. Jews were called “the Muslims with the blue caps,” referring to the color of the yarmulkes some still wore.

“In our family, we didn’t eat pork, that’s for sure,” says Nina Wang, a 24-year-old Kaifeng native who now lives in Israel and underwent orthodox Jewish conversion. The family had menorahs and Sabbath cups, she said, “but we didn’t know what to do with those things.”

When thousands of European Jews settled in Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s to escape the Holocaust, a few Kaifengers went there to study. But the Shanghai Jews were focused on aiding those persecuted in Europe.

After the Communists took over in 1949, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping fretted that Kaifeng Jews might be subversive. In a 1953 document, they wrote that the “Kaifeng Jewish community is disclosing secrets to the overseas communities and causing trouble.”

Even so, Kaifeng Jews say they weren’t singled out for discrimination. Ms. Guo says that her friends used to tease her, saying she must be smart and good at making money—common Chinese stereotypes of Jews— but she didn’t feel threatened.

As China opened again to foreigners in the 1980s, Jewish tourists, Christian missionaries and foreign academics made their way to Kaifeng, each doling out different advice. Xu Xin, a non-Jewish professor of Jewish studies at Nanjing University, said some Kaifengers turned to him as a kind of rabbi to ask whether or not they were Jewish. He demurred.

These days, many in Kaifeng turn to Timothy Lerner, who calls himself a “messianic Jew”—meaning he was born Jewish but believes in Christ as the Messiah—to learn Hebrew and Jewish customs. Mr. Lerner acknowledges that his visa was revoked by the Chinese government in 2006 for evangelizing, but says he doesn’t try to convince anyone to follow his religious beliefs. He says he set up the “Kaifeng Israel School” to help Kaifeng Jews “learn the Jewish lifestyle” and move to Israel, where about a dozen of them have taken up residence, thanks largely to funds from Shavei Israel, an Israeli group.

Others in the Jewish community are suspicious. Shi Lei, one of the first Kaifeng Jews to study in Israel, blames Mr. Lerner for “creating factions” in the tiny community with his school, though Mr. Lerner says Mr. Shi misunderstands his efforts.

Today, Kaifeng Jews tread with caution given China’s ban on unauthorized religious activity. The Jewish descendants say they rarely meet in groups of 10—the number required by Jewish law for a religious service—for fear the government might consider that a political gathering. They make DVDs of themselves wearing traditional Chinese garb while they light Sabbath candles, to portray the act as a folk custom.

Passover is celebrated as a restaurant meal, not as a religious gathering, though some pass out matzos sent from Hong Kong.

As for Jewish tourist sites, there isn’t much to see. Several stone tablets from different Kaifeng synagogues are stored in an unmarked, padlocked room in the Kaifeng Municipal Museum.

Some of the city’s notables (none of whom are Jewish) are looking to boost tourism by rebuilding the Kaifeng synagogue, but as a museum so as not to inflame the Chinese government. “You could have tourists stay a night with local Jewish descendants to see what their lives are like,” says Su Linzhong, a management professor at Kaifeng University. “They are so emotional about their grandparents.”

—Yang Jie contributed to this article.

Write to Bob Davis at bob.davis@wsj.com

Originally published here.

Published: August 12, 2011

PETALUMA, Calif. — On Sabbath morning, as fog still hung over the valley, the campers walked past the Torrey pines and blackberry bushes toward the garden. There, several rows of chairs had been arranged in front of an altar fashioned from a folding table covered with Senegalese cloth and a Torah scroll on loan from an Orthodox synagogue.

About 15 minutes into the service, two girls rose to lead the congregation in a series of prayers. “Baruch atah Adonai eloheinu, melech ha-olam, she’asani Yisrael,” they said. Then they switched to the English translation: “Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of the Universe, who has made me a Jew.”

In all its ordinariness, as a standard part of liturgy, the assertion could hardly have been bolder, coming as it did from Amalia Cymrot-Wu and her camp buddy Maya Campbell. Maya is the daughter of an interracial black-white marriage, Amalia the product of Brazilian and Chinese bloodlines, and they were matter-of-factly proclaiming their place among the Jewish people.

Such is the mission of Camp Be’chol Lashon (“In Every Tongue”) here in the hills of Marin County about 35 miles north of San Francisco. For the past two years, it has provided the commonplaces of Jewish summer camp, right down to poison oak and bug juice, to an emerging population of Jews of color.

“If there’s Christians of all colors and all kinds, and Muslims of all colors and all kinds,” Amalia, 11, said over Shabbat lunch, “then why would Jewishness be any different?”

One of her fellow campers, Josh Rowen-Keran, 14, who was born to black and Korean parents and then adopted by an interracial couple in the Bay Area, sounded similarly nonchalant. “Being Jewish isn’t looking a certain way,” he said. “I could look at anyone and not know if they are or aren’t Jewish. You can’t know till you know the person.”

Yet what strikes these children as the same old same old, an American-Jewish community of multiple hues and heritages, has arrived as a seismic change. Religiously and historically, Judaism has generally placed little emphasis on evangelism and conversion.

While Israel’s law granting instant citizenship to any Jew has brought it a sizable number of Ethiopians and Indians, the American Jewish picture has looked much whiter. As the largest group of Jewish immigrants to the United States, those from Eastern Europe have set the cultural tone since the early 1900s. Their folkways — bagels, Yiddish, New Deal politics, Borsht Belt jokes — became a virtual religion. Which meant that nobody from outside could ever get completely inside.

Entering the new century, however, the demographers Gary and Diane Tobin conducted a survey that estimated that 10 percent of America’s six million Jews were nonwhite. Their route into the community had been through conversion, adoption and interracial parentage, rather than Ellis Island. (Other scholars place the number slightly lower, at roughly 450,000.)

Living out the phenomenon themselves, the Tobins adopted their African-American son, Jonah, soon after his birth 14 years ago. Between their continuing research and their parental experience, the Tobins began to worry about how much these Jews of color would ever be accepted and included.

“It was a sense of the Other, and we as a community are not great at dealing with the Other,” Ms. Tobin said. “We had centuries of persecution making us wary. We have a tendency to be more suspicious than welcoming.”

For a decade until Gary Tobin’s death in 2009, the couple ran a speakers’ series on Jewish diversity, arranged parties for Hanukkah and Shavuot, then held retreats for multiracial Jewish families at an outdoor education center here. All those efforts led to the opening of Camp Be’chol Lashon last summer with 18 children, ages 8 to 16, from the Bay Area.

This year, the number has grown to 25, and word of mouth has brought campers from as far as Arizona and New Jersey. Some attend Jewish day schools and have had bar or bat mitzvah ceremonies; others have experienced little Jewish observance at home. For $1,800 apiece, they all get two weeks of participating in Jewish camping in both familiar and radically new ways.

They make challah covers, sometimes from Ghanaian kente cloth or Indian fabric. They hold a scavenger hunt called “Where in the world is Eliyahu?” — meaning the prophet Elijah — and earn clues by correctly answering questions about Jews around the world. (Q: A recording of religious music performed by Jews from which country was nominated for a Grammy Award? A: Uganda.)

The head counselor, Kenny Kahn, is a biracial Jew who attended the family retreats as a teenager. When the campers recited the Kaddish prayer for the dead during Sabbath worship, a boy named Adin said he was doing it in memory of his grandfather Oppenheimer and Martin Luther King Jr.

For all that is innovative at Be’chol Lashon, the socializing mission of the camp remains consistent with the goals of Jewish camps that have been operated for decades by the various religious movements, Zionist factions and cultural organizations.

“Camps transmit Jewish life effectively because they create a unified existence of friendship, independence and positive adult relationships in Jewish space, a calendar built on Jewish time such as Shabbat, and Jewish content,” said Riv-Ellen Prell, a professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota, who has studied Jewish camping. “These camps succeed because they effectively create a sense of the importance of Jewish life and learning through performance, creativity and physical activity.”

So, during the Sabbath service, Rabbi Ruth Abusch-Magder guided the children through the Torah portion. The passage described the Jews near the Promised Land, and the 12 spies Moses sent to report on it, and the way all but two of them, Joshua and Caleb, returned with fearful reports.

“We remember the people who saw the good things,” the rabbi said. “That’s the challenge we have, to see the good things around us.”

As one girl listened, a butterfly landed on her pinkie. It just sat there, occasionally beating its beautiful wings, as other campers watched. One of them named it Eliyahu.

E-mail: sgf1@columbia.edu

If you meet David Cohn, he won’t tell you he’s a rapper. Should you ask him what he does for a living, he’ll answer that he’s unemployed. He used to drive a Budweiser truck around Chicago, delivering beer to every liquor store south of the Loop. Then he got a job working in a shaman shop owned by a former producer for the Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev. He sold DMT, ayahuasca, salvia and enough esoteric psychedelics to make William Burroughs bug out. But only until 11 a.m. Then he’d go play pingpong.

The downside of working in a hallucinogenic Wonkaland is that there’s always someone with Day-Glo hair and a Kombucha tea addiction willing to work for soy milk and scrip. So two years ago, Cohn was axed and his personal life pinwheeled into tragedy: withering substance-abuse addictions among family members, crippling debt, a severe case of pneumonia that left him temporarily incapacitated and scarred by a pair of minor strokes.

Several months ago, Cohn fled the trauma — and the backbreaking Second City wind — to relocate to L.A., the home of his new label, the appropriately eccentric Anticon. Last week, he released Family & Friends, a bleak, melancholic and wry art-rap record that ranks as the most searing and powerful of his dozen-plus disc catalog. But unless you knew better, you would never know that Cohn was really Serengeti, his primary musical alter ego.

Serengeti emerged more than a dozen years ago, during a year Cohn spent studying abroad in Sweden, watching nature videos and teaching himself how to make music — a predilection that, like depression, runs in his blood. His great-uncle Sonny Cohn was a world-famous trumpeter in Count Basie’s band, but the younger Cohn was raised during the Golden Age and grew transfixed by KMD and MF Doom. So he started rapping, got weirder, turned semipro.

“I’d get offers to headline in Chicago, but as the 10th rapper on a bill of 10. By the time I performed, the only people left were the rappers,” Cohn says, speaking from his small and sparsely furnished apartment in Glassell Park — his furniture having been hocked on Craigslist to help finance the move.

After all, the contemporary indie hip-hop world is a war of attrition, especially for those with obtuse sensibilities. Rap fans prefer their cult artists as cartoons, while Serengeti eschews self-promotion and contrived mythology. The latest trend is to name rap songs after SEO-friendly icons like Donald Trump, Miley Cyrus and Michael Jordan. By contrast, Serengeti’s most popular song is “Dennehy” (from the 2006 album of the same name), a paean to the gruff actor best known to the sub-30 set as Big Tom Callahan in Tommy Boy.

But Serengeti isn’t rapping as himself on “Dennehy.” Instead, the song is performed by one of his alter egos, Kenny Dennis, a 48-year-old white guy besotted with bratwurst, Buicks, onions, softball, Richard Daley, actors Dennehy and Tom Berenger, and his wife, Jueles — not to mention the Bulls, White Sox, Blackhawks and da Bears. Kenny has a mustache the size of Mike Ditka’s forehead and an affinity for O’Doul’s — not because he’s a recovering alcoholic but because he finds it delicious.

Why would a black/Jewish rapper adopt the pug-nosed Polish slang of a Bill Swerski Super Fan? It all started when Cohn was watching the Little League World Series on TV one year, and the announcers were asking the kids about their favorite actors and athletes. “I wondered what it would be like if someone’s favorite actor was Brian Dennehy,” Cohn says, sipping coffee and wearing pajama pants at 5 p.m.

But Kenny Dennis is neither SNL sketch nor satire. Cohn’s genius lies in his three-dimensional commitment to his creations — a worldview bounded by regional chains, Windy City intonation and tribal loyalty. Nagged by the willful suspension of belief required to accept a middle-aged, blue-collar man rapping, Cohn cultivated the elaborate backstory.

“Serengeti explores the medium’s potential as art. Not in the self-indulgent or abstract-for-the-sake-of sense, but in the sense of a real person exploring the range of their experiences, emotional and otherwise,” says Mike Eagle, a friend of Cohn’s since their days at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and a gifted art rapper in his own right. “Serengeti is vulnerable, and makes his work valuable in a way that economics or popularity can’t define.”

Serengeti is the rap Sam Beckett, quantum leaping into different spirits, including a different, 1993 iteration of Kenny — who was, in this telling, then known as KD, Tha Killa Deacon.

“It’s fun for me to be Kenny because he’s just a simple guy who’s happy all the time. All he wants is his wife, Jueles, sports, and some brats and chops,” Cohn says. “I’m usually depressed. When I’m not Kenny, everything I write draws back to my real life, which has often been really fucked up.” To wit: His first girlfriend, of a decade, died in a car accident, folks close to him have had drug problems, and he still has to deal with the spatial problems caused by his strokes.

Alysa Stanton made headlines by becoming the first African-American woman to be ordained a rabbi.

After completing her studies at Cincinnati’s Hebrew Union College, she took over the Bayt Shalom synagogue in Greenville, N.C. That was in 2009. Her contract expires at the end of this month.

In an interview with NPR’s Michel Martin, Stanton says she began her spiritual search at a young age.

“I had called a priest to find out more about Catholicism and to make an appointment with him at 9 years old,” says Stanton, who was raised Pentecostal. The phone rang one night, she says, and her older sister answered it and handed it to her mother. It was the priest calling back. “A man who calls a 9-year-old girl at night would be a concern for any parent. So that’s when my journey began officially, that I can recall,” she says.

In her early 20s, while living in Denver, she was undergoing “a traditional conversion” to Judaism and learned about the role of a cantor, Stanton says — “leading people to prayer through music.”

“I thought that would be my nirvana: to be able to sing and pray and praise God, and get paid for it. So I said, ‘OK, God, open the door and point the way.’ And I went to my rabbi, got his blessing, and the rest is history, so to speak.”

In her service as a rabbi, her background “provides challenges for some and opportunities of others,” she says.

“I’m a single parent. I’m an African-American rabbi who happens to be female. Each of those in itself presents its own uniqueness and its own challenges. But when you combine them together, it’s a lot for some people,” she says.

And yet, she recalls a moment when one of her congregants told her, “You’re the only rabbi my children know. You’re the only rabbi that my children want.” Stanton says that in their eyes, an African-American woman is what a rabbi is.

“To others who are older, who are used to seeing an Anglo male, that is their concept of what a rabbi is and should be. [Is] either one of them greater than the other? Absolutely not,” she says.

“So, I learned to deal with the issues head-on. Other people have not honed those skills so well. And so we just deal with it to the best of our ability.”

In addition to leading Bayt Shalom, Stanton is writing a book and giving seminars and lectures around the United States.

“I continue to be on my outreach to people of all faiths, and clergy of all faiths, because I believe that together we can invoke change in this world,” she says.

Originally on National Public Radio. Listen to the story here.