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‘Conversion’ Archive

He’s Found a Home at Hillel

Posted February 3, 2011 Conversion, News No Comments

February 03, 2011 – Deborah Hirsch, Staff Writer

In the third floor beit midrash at the University of Pennsylvania Hillel, Emery “Eliezer” Williams gazed straight ahead while the students around him bowed over prayerbooks, swaying back and forth to the rhythm of their silent worship.

His stance was not the only thing that set him apart. At 47 years of age, Williams has a distinct seniority in this crowd — as long as university administrators or clergy aren’t around.

Oh, and he’s black. And blind.

“It’s not every day that you see an African-American with a yarmulke and a blind walking stick walking through the Penn campus,” said Jeremy Goldman, 35, a healthcare attorney in Baltimore who befriended Williams after starting law school at Penn in 1998. “You couldn’t help but notice him.”

To the Orthodox students, Williams has been a fixture in their community for as long as they can remember. He’s been coming here for more than 20 years — longer than most of the current undergraduates have been alive.

Read the full story here.

Israeli Police Unit Accused of Beating African-American Immigrants

Posted October 24, 2010 Conversion, News No Comments

By Bradley Burston

The Interior Ministry’s controversial Oz immigration police unit has been accused of beating and verbally abusing members of an African-American family from Kansas City whose members converted to Judaism several years ago, and are living in Ashkelon pending a decision on their citizenship request.

	An Oz official questioning a foreign worker in Tel Aviv.
	Photo by: Nir Kafri

Kristien Garrett, 24, who is seven months pregnant, was taken by ambulance to Ashkelon’s Barzilai Hospital after the Oz unit operation. During the operation, several officers detained her husband Sean, telling family members that his name did not appear “in the system” of the ministry’s Population Registry.

Witnesses said Kristien Garrett’s one-year-old daughter and Garrett’s mother Trina Woodcox were struck a number of times as the officers moved to detain Garrett’s husband. Sean Garrett was allegedly handcuffed, beaten repeatedly and subjected to racial slurs while in custody; he was later released when ministry officials determined that his visa was valid.

The Oz unit, which spearheads a high-profile Interior Ministry campaign to track and expel foreign nationals who lack valid permits to remain in Israel, admitted to having detained a family member in error, but denied allegations of use of physical force. It countered that family members had attacked them with “cursing and swearing.”

The family had come to Israel at the invitation of the Interior Ministry, which asked to interview them prior to a final decision on their request for immigrant status. Ministry officials held a hearing on their case last month, a step in the process toward receiving citizenship.

When Woodcox, who held the family’s documents, asked to accompany Sean Garrett in the police van, “officers grabbed her by her hair and her head, and pulled her by her leg,” dragging her out of the vehicle, Kristien Garrett told Haaretz Thursday, after her release from the hospital.

The officer with her mother “turned around and started hitting me and my child in the face,” she said. Her husband tried to help her, “but two other officers jumped on him, handcuffed him, and beat him up while the other officer was hitting me and my daughter.”

Neighbors left their houses to come to the family’s aid. “Everything was just a big frenzy,” Garrett said. “One of the neighbors came and took my daughter away from me, so that she wouldn’t be hit any more. The police officer was kicking me and hit me in my stomach, and I hit him back, to get him off of me.”

Another neighbor called an ambulance. Kristien Garrett was taken to Barzilai with cramps, and hospitalized overnight. She has now been discharged on bed rest.
The lawyer for the family, Nicole Maor of the Israel Religious Action Center, said that they had been subjected to racial abuse by the police officers, who reportedly yelled at them: “Afro-Americans, kushim [darkies], we don’t need you here.”

Family members said the officer who had struck Kristien Garrett later returned and apologized to Sean for beating his wife. “He said that he had never hit a woman before, and that he felt bad for the mistake that had been made,” Woodcox said.

Oz unit official Yehuda Ben-Ezra denied that the officers had used physical force against the family, saying that his inspectors had filed a police complaint alleging that the family had attacked them with profanity.

Questioned regarding Garrett’s hospitalization, Ben-Ezra told Army Radio, “The woman is not in the hospital because of violence by inspectors. Really not.” Pressed by news anchor Yael Dan, Ben-Ezra said “I have no idea why she was hospitalized – why she went to the hospital.”

“You mean there was no violence there?” Dan asked.

“Not on the part of my inspectors. On the part of the residents, yes. On the part of my inspectors, truly no.”

The morning after the incident, Trina Woodcox went to the Ashkelon police station to file a complaint against the police, but was rebuffed.

“They called her a liar, and said that they couldn’t accept her complaint,” said Maor.

Wilcox wrote Kansas City Reform Rabbi Arthur Nemitoff, who had converted the family to Judaism, “My heart is breaking right now.

“We have so much love for Israel. But it seems like Israel does not love us back.”

Originally published here.

Being Black, Orthodox Jews Without Dividing Loyalties

Posted August 25, 2010 Conversion, News No Comments

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

Shais Rison, left, and Yitzchak Jordan are black Orthodox Jews, a rarity in New York and the nation.

By TRYMAINE LEE

In yeshivas, they are sometimes taunted as “monkeys” or with the Yiddish epithet for blacks. At synagogues and kosher restaurants, they engender blank stares. And dating can be awkward: their numbers are so small, friends will often share at least some romantic history with the same man or woman, and matchmakers always pair them with people with whom they have little in common beyond skin color.

They are African-Americans and Orthodox Jews, a rare cross-cultural hybrid that seems quintessentially Brooklyn, but received little notice until last week, after Yoseph Robinson, a Jamaican-born convert, was killed during a robbery attempt at the kosher liquor store where he worked.

At his funeral and in interviews afterward, a portrait emerged of a small, insular but energized community that is proud but underpinned by a constant tug of race and religiosity.

In Crown Heights, one of the city’s hubs of Orthodox Jewish life, blacks and Jews have long lived side by side and have occasionally clashed. In 1991, riots broke out after a car in a motorcade carrying a Hasidic leader veered onto the sidewalk, killing one black child and badly injuring another.

Nobody keeps track of how many black Orthodox Jews are in New York or across the nation, and surely it is a tiny fraction of both populations. Indeed, even the number of black Jews over all is elusive, though a 2005 book about Jewish diversity, “In Every Tongue,” cited studies suggesting that some 435,000 American Jews, or 7 percent, were black, Hispanic, Asian or American Indian.

“Everyone agrees that the numbers have grown, and they should be noticed,” said Jonathan D. Sarna of Brandeis University, a pre-eminent historian of American Jewry. “Once, there was a sense that ‘so-and-so looked Jewish.’ Today, because of conversion and intermarriage and patrilineal descent, that’s less and less true. The average synagogue looks more like America.

“Even in an Orthodox synagogue, there’s likely to be a few people who look different,” Professor Sarna said, “and everybody assumes that will grow.”

Through the Internet, younger black Orthodox Jews are coming together in ways they never could before.

In Crown Heights, a group has struggled to form a minyan, the quorum of 10 men required for group prayer, though Mr. Robinson’s death leaves them one short. On the first Wednesday of each month, about 15 to 20 so-called “Jews of color” (not all of them Orthodox) meet to trade their experiences and insights. There is also a New York branch of the national group Jews in All Hues.

“They are strengthening their blackness through Judaism,” said Asher Rison, 62, a black Jew who lives in the Mill Basin section of Brooklyn, said of the younger generation. “They don’t have a place of their own, so they are trying to carve out their own niche.”

Mr. Rison converted more than 25 years ago after meeting his wife, who is also black and traces her Orthodox roots back to the late 1800s. The oldest of their five children, Shais, 28, is the founder of Manishtana.net — a Web site that plays off the classic Passover question, “Why is this night different?” — and Jocflock.org, a dating site for Jews of color, sometimes dubbed “J.O.C.’s.”

Shais Rison said he opted for a yarmulke over the black fedora worn by many Orthodox men and preferred his gefilte fish as his mother prepares it, seasoned with Jamaican peppers and spices. He said balancing being black and an Orthodox Jew was part of the broader identity struggle of being black.

“I have encountered people who actually get that Judaism isn’t about skin color,” he said. “But the majority of people will stare at you as you walk down the street. You would think that we were covered in chicken feathers.”

Shais Rison said it was often other black people who questioned him and his Jewish friends of color, viewing them as suspicious or as sellouts. And not all black Orthodox Jews agree on how to balance their loyalties. Some, he said, “see being Jewish as not being black anymore.”

“Those are the people who don’t want to associate or get together with other black Jews,” he said. “Everyone wants to play the only one, like ‘I’m a black Jew, and I want my struggle to be unique so people will look at me as a commodity.’ ”

Yochanan Reid, a former musician who was attracted to Judaism during a difficult period in his life and converted about six years ago, said he was “a Jew first.”

“There are those who consider themselves black and Jewish and those who consider themselves Jewish,” said Mr. Reid, 29. “But, where do I live? I live where the Jews live. I speak the language that the Jews speak. You eat kosher food because you are a Jew. You dress a certain way. I am also black, but how does that define me? I am a Jew first.”

Akeda Fulcher, a family court advocate who lives in Crown Heights, said that she was a fourth-generation observant black Jew, and that new efforts at multicultural curriculums in Jewish schools helped ease racial tension among the Orthodox.

“There is nothing in the Torah that says you can’t be black and Jewish at the same time,” she said. “I think it gives my Judaism flavor. I think that my foods, my music, my dance, my struggles — everything that makes me a black woman also make me a beautiful black Jewish woman. There is no difference between the two for me. I am what God made me, and everything about me is beautiful because of that.”

Yitzchak Jordan, a black Orthodox rapper, said he became interested in Judaism as a child in Baltimore, learning from his Puerto Rican grandmother, whose own father had worked for a Jewish family upon moving to the mainland. At 14, he started wearing a yarmulke and observing Shabbat. He converted about 10 years ago, and he later studied at a yeshiva in Jerusalem.

Walking along Kingston Avenue one afternoon last week with Shais Rison, Mr. Jordan, who is known as both Yitz and Y-Love, was greeted by young white, Orthodox Jews with handshakes and head nods. “I love your music, man!” one told him. In Basil, a new kosher cafe, he beamed between bites of pizza as one of his songs played over the speakers.

Mr. Jordan said that he had a large following in Israel and that his music had been embraced by a generation of young Jews that feels marginalized.

“A black Orthodox Jewish kid is far less likely to grow into an Orthodox Jewish adult because you have a lot of racism in the school system, not so much institutionalized but more like social racism,” he said. “When people hear my music or see my face on a T-shirt, they can relate.”

———-

Robinson’s website.

NYT story originally published here.

Who’s a Jew?

Posted August 19, 2010 Conversion, News No Comments

There is arguably no more challenging question for the Jewish community than, “Who’s a Jew?” It continually arises, over issues ranging from politics (most recently, the ultra-Orthodox control over Israeli conversions) to entertainment and even sports (is Amar’e or isn’t he?). One thing is certain: the overwhelming majority of Jews globally were born into it. There’s more than a little truth to the expression “members of the tribe.”

For those not born Jewish, joining the Jewish religion requires overcoming high barriers, even within the more liberal streams of Judaism. To put it in its simplest terms: for men, blood must be drawn. Get past the circumcision, the studying, and the meetings with rabbis to become an official Jew, and there is often still, shamefully, some other Jew questioning a convert’s sincerity or authenticity.

Ultimately I believe the guidelines of “Who’s a Jew?” must be expanded if the Jewish community — particularly the American Jewish community — is to remain relevant well into the 21st century.

There’s precedent for changing the answer to “Who’s a Jew?” In Biblical times, our forbears inherited Judaism through their fathers. In the Rabbinic age, it switched to the mothers, and the notion of “matrilineal descent” is still deeply ingrained in much of world Jewry today. But in modern times, the Reconstructionist movement (in 1968) and then the much larger Reform movement (in 1983) accepted Jewish identity through either parent — provided that the children were raised and educated as Jews.

That bold decision to accept patrilineal descent has enabled literally hundreds of thousands of individuals to call themselves “Jewish” who previously couldn’t, which many Jews support but others believe is a terrible disaster for the Jewish people. At the time, and for years after, the Reform movement was accused of splitting the Jewish people in two. But the reality is that we were always more than just two kinds of Jewry.

Today, while there are still only a few different synagogue denominations, there are hundreds of ways for Jews to express their Jewish identity. And that diversity could bode well for the Jewish future, because the American belief in the “marketplace of ideas” has extended to religions as well. Last year’s “Faith in Flux” study from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that “about half of American adults have changed religious affiliation at least once during their lives.”

Unfortunately, until now the religion-switching that Pew identified has meant a net loss for Judaism. It makes sense, considering how much easier it is to leave Judaism than to enter! But the past does not have to dictate the future. If only we could “open the gates” of Judaism, as the late researcher Gary Tobin advocated, and offer all the various ways of being Jewish, many more people might choose to join us.

Absorbing large waves of newcomers is a scary proposition for many Jews, even in Israel, a country that has proven that it can do it over and over again. For American Jews, particularly the majority who are not religiously observant but are still connected culturally or “ethnically,” the notion that anyone would actually be attracted to Judaism often seems baffling, though it shouldn’t. In many cases, newcomers see the values in our traditions even better than those of us who grew up in the community.

This inability to graciously accept newcomers is a phenomenon I call “Born-Jewish Privilege.” It is a Born-Jewish Privilege to be able to ask someone, immediately upon learning that he or she is a convert, “You mean you actually chose to become Jewish?” — even as an attempted joke. And it is a Born-Jewish Privilege to then turn around (at perhaps the very same event!) and ask the non-Jewish spouse of a Jew, “Do you plan to convert?”

It is a Born-Jewish Privilege to not do a single thing Jewish all year — not attend synagogue, not observe Shabbat, not donate to Jewish causes — yet feel completely 100-percent Jewish while at the same time questioning the authenticity of an intermarried household where the non-Jewish parent is doing all of those things in order to instill a Jewish identity in his or her child.

Overcoming Born-Jewish Privilege will be very difficult, because the privileged are always loath to give up their status. But pointing out that the privilege even exists, by a simple accident of birth, is the first step. Helping Jews recognize that there’s something worth sharing about Judaism with the rest of the world seems like another logical step. That Amar’e Stoudemire’s recent Jewish journey would provoke such fascination in the Jewish community a full decade after Madonna embraced Kabbalah, or that Chelsea Clinton marrying a Jew would require so much open soul-searching about Jewish intermarriage when more than half of all American households containing a Jewish spouse today are intermarriages, means we’re still stuck in the same place as we were decades ago, without providing increased access for more people to make the Jewish journey with us.

In most cases, it doesn’t really matter “Who’s a Jew,” because it’s rarely an issue of halakhah (Jewish law). If Amar’e wants to read from the Torah at a Conservative synagogue during Shabbat services, we’ll worry about it then. Odds are good that he doesn’t want that. Odds are also good that Jews will trip over themselves helping him find what he’s looking for, because he’s a superstar. (And as a long-suffering Knicks fan, I have no problem with that.) But what about the million non-Jews married to Jews in the U.S., almost all of whom are not famous like Amar’e? Or the children and young adults from intermarried families? What is the Jewish community doing proactively to incorporate them? Still too little.

Some have attempted to find special names for the non-Jews among us, like ger toshav (resident alien), but how about, for those who want it, “Jewish”? Intermarried families raising Jewish children are, as Rabbi Kerry Olitzky, executive director of the Jewish Outreach Institute, simply calls them, “Jewish families.”

The Jewish community does not have a unifying creed that can easily be signed onto, the way you can call yourself Christian by accepting Jesus as Savior. There’s a Jewish movement that accepts the Torah as the exact word of God, and a Jewish movement that denies the existence of God; there are Jews for whom Zionism is their most important belief, and Jews who reject the establishment of the modern State of Israel as immoral. There is scant little we agree on, and we need to define ourselves to newcomers based on what we are, not what we’re not. The Biblical Ruth had a simple credo as her “conversion” to Judaism: “Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God.” The “people” in that phrase came before God for a reason. Would it be so bad for the Jews if we reverted back to that kind of conversion?

Or perhaps we can draw our credo from Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, who is quoted as having said, “I consider as Jewish anyone who is meshuge [crazy] enough to call themselves ‘Jewish.’”

Originally published here.

A Community of Guatemalan Converts

Posted August 13, 2010 Conversion, News No Comments

Letter from Guatemala City

http://www.forward.com/articles/130011/

By Rachel Rubin

Published August 11, 2010, issue of August 20, 2010.

Like many 21-year-old travelers, I had no plan. No money. And no real assurance that I was even going to be picked up from the airport on a late rainy evening in Central America’s most notoriously dangerous city. Because I also knew no one.

All the same, I hopped on a plane to Guatemala City last May, convinced that my brothers and sisters in the faith of Abraham would receive me with open arms. After all, I had been welcomed earlier into the Panamanian-Jewish community for Passover and by the Jewish community in Costa Rica for Purim. I had discovered the widespread theme of marvelous Jewish hospitality, and it had fueled my adventurous side.

But this particular Guatemalan Jewish community was different from any Jewish experience I had ever had. Casa Hillel-Beit Hamadrij is a humble group of roughly 50 Christian-born converts who, unlike members of the country’s longer-established and more prosperous Jewish communities, come from Guatemala City’s struggling working class.

Alvaro Orantes, president of Casa Hillel, says that members of his community like to be referred to as “re-converts.” Some community members like to think they could be descended from Spanish crypto-Jews who fled the Inquisition, or from one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. But there is no evidence to corroborate any of this.

“My soul is Jewish,” said Efrain Hernandez, a member of Casa Hillel. “When I began to study Torah, I just knew that this was part of who I am.”

The community members’ lifestyles seem roughly comparable with that of many observant Conservative Jews. They keep the Sabbath, lighting candles on Friday night and marking its close with the Havdalah ceremony. On Sabbath and on major Jewish holidays, they refrain from using electricity — though they do drive to services and to each other’s homes because of the high level of violence in their neighborhoods. Once they arrive at their meeting place on a typical Sabbath, they stay there all day, having meals and studying Torah. Family homes serve as Hebrew and religious schools during the week.

Orantes, who works as a salesman at a local tea and coffee plant, said he began his personal path to conversion at age 16, when he would visit a Jewish cemetery in Guatemala City. There, he said, he felt a sense of peace that he never experienced when he went to Catholic Church.

Ten years ago, Orantes, now 50, and his wife, Jeannette, 53, made a decision to embark on a self-directed study of Judaism. By 2003, he said, his feelings about Judaism inspired him to go to a doctor and have himself circumcised. But the couple, who had begun to gather a like-minded community around them, still lacked a real teacher to lead them. Orantes said he was curtly rebuffed when he approached local Jewish leaders for assistance.

Beside Casa Hillel, there are four Jewish communities in Guatemala, all located in Guatemala City. Centro Hebreo (an Ashkenazi Orthodox community) and Maguen David (Sephardic) are both long-standing and wealthy. There is also the Chabad-Lubavitch community and a group of more or less secular Israelis that gathers for holidays and the Sabbath. Only the secular Israelis would even talk with them.

Then by fate, said Orantes, he discovered Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn’s website in 2005.

Cukierkorn, a Brazilian-born rabbi at the New Reform Temple in Kansas City, Mo., operates an organization called Kulanu that focuses on discovering and converting lost Jewish communities of the world.

“We’d been looking for Judaism since 2000,” related Jeanette Orantes. The newcomers the couple had attracted were “interested, but confused,” Jeanette said, in uncertain English. “This is a kind of phenomenon in Latin America. Many people have been looking for being taught by the Jewish communities, but they are so closed, so we look for foreign orientation, and lucky us, we found Rabbi Jacques in 2005.”

Prior to meeting him, “There wasn’t anyone who could help us, giving trustable information,” she said.

Cukierkorn initially communicated with the nascent community over the Internet. Via video, he conducted classes in Judaism and discussed with them books he had assigned.

Eventually, he decided to convert Orantes and his wife and friends to Judaism, and to take on a role as the honorary rabbi of their community. Among other things, he also helped Orantes legally incorporate Casa Hillel as a religious organization.

Out of gratitude, the new converts named their group “Casa Hillel” after Jacques’s father, Hillel Cukierkorn.

A couple of times a year, Cukierkorn visits Guatemala and performs such rabbinical duties as conversion ceremonies. He also performs Jewish remarriages for couples who were married as Catholics before their conversion.

Cukierkorn’s synagogue has adopted Casa Hillel and is paying half its rent, providing its members with Jewish books in Spanish, Torah Scrolls, and other Jewish paraphernalia for their homes.

On one of his early visits, Cukierkorn, who felt the group should have local teachers to guide them, went with Orantes to meet Rabbi Shimon Lubelski, of Centro Hebreo, the Ashkenazi congregation.

According to Orantes and Cukierkorn, Lubelski initially agreed to meet further with Orantes to discuss teaching Judaism to his group. But he “called ten minutes later after he said he would do it” to cancel, said Orantes.

It is easy to imagine the fears that might make established Jewish leaders reluctant to convert the Catholic born aspirants in a heavily Catholic and very violent country. But there are also class issues. Most of the other Jews live in gated communities far removed from the everyday dangers faced by ordinary Guatemalans, as well as the country’s deep and widespread poverty.

During his visit to Centro Hebreo, Cukierkorn recalled, a synagogue administrator “was totally dismissive” of Orantes. “Had he been a dog, she would have noticed him more. She paid more attention to the chairs than to him… It was horrible!”

“These are some of the most committed, interested and eager people I ever encountered,” said the Reform rabbi. “After my own congregation, I can’t think of anywhere else in the world I wish to spend time.”

Calls and emails to Lubelski and leaders of the other Jewish communities were not returned. But asked in a 2008 interview with Hadassah Magazine about the Casa Hillel’s community’s outreach to him, Lubelski said his community does not perform conversions. “If people want to convert, they have to go to New York, Miami or Tel Aviv,” he said.

The Orthodox rabbi also acknowledged that mainstream Guatemalan Jews, most of whom are Orthodox, do not welcome Casa Hillel members and do not accept Cukierkorn’s Reform conversions.

“We respect [them], but we are not interested in any encounters between the two communities,” he said.

The rejection clearly stings. “I am not allowed to go to their minyan,” Casa Hillel member Santiago Castaneda told me with shame in his eyes.

The Castaneda family, who hosted me during my visit, gave me an inside look at the challenges they face as practicing Jews in their city.

On a Friday, I accompanied Raudith Castaneda, the mother, with the Castanedas’ two daughters as we spent a day preparing for the Sabbath. We cooked for the more than 30 people expected that night, carefully sifting through hundreds of spinach leaves as we made a casserole. There were charts of Hebrew letters on the wall, newspaper clippings of Israeli news, and a small table that stood in the center of their home, displaying a modest collection of their Jewish memorabilia.

Their 13-year-old son, Jose, a recent bar mitzvah, told me he will only marry a Jewish girl.

When Havdalah came the next day, the Castanedas and I stood around the table with our arms around one another’s shoulders and recited the prayers. It was a powerfully spiritual moment, although fleeting, as it was interrupted by a string of gunshots across the street.

“Now is the time we need to be united together,” Jeannette Orantes told me on the same visit. “And I am telling you ‘we’ because we are also Jews, as you are. The difference is that we chose to become Jews and you were born a Jew. We will run the same destiny with all of you, and we know this. The providence will provide us with what we deserve, on His perfect time.”

Jeannette said that her favorite holiday was Shavuot, when the Book of Ruth is read.

“How easy it was for her to become a Jew,” she said. “And what a lovely way of Boaz to accept her. Just let me share with you Ruth’s words: ‘Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God.’”
http://www.forward.com/articles/130011/