Posts Tagged ‘Conversion’

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/

Reflections of African American Women Converts

Posted May 18, 2010 Conversion, News No Comments

Following their true paths
Photo by: Jerusalem Post staff

Following their true paths

By SHEREE R. CURRY
18/05/2010 16:17

The biblical Ruth, one of only two women in the Bible who have their own book, was a convert to Judaism. She left her family’s heritage to endure the hardships of a convert. She made the decision to follow the laws of Moses and never turn back despite the great difficulties she had to endure. Still, she became an accepted member of the Jewish people and the grandmother of King David. Her role is an important one in Jewish history, and it is not too unlike the stories of other female converts to Judaism, especially those of African American women who discover their Jewish neshama (soul) in their adulthood.

The journey to one’s Jewish soul may have several bumps along the way, but those who choose Judaism for genuine reasons often find that they were on that path long before they themselves had the revelation that, at their core, they were already Jewish. While African American converts often report that they are well-accepted by other members of their adopted religion, there is no doubt that the color of their skin is forever a reminder to Caucasian Jews that their history appears different. However, they found unconditional support from their nucleus family, particularly their mothers. For those, however, who want to think differently of these women, consider their strength and perseverance as they live a Jewish life in a world that still believes Jews are “white,” when in reality, we come in all shades and races.

Ahuvah Gray was 50 before she formally converted to Judaism on April 2, 1997, but her journey began long before the first time she was turned away by a beit din (rabbinical court) in Israel when she sought to formalize the life she had been living for so many years. Her journey began, in some ways, in her childhood as she would visit her grandparents in Mound Bayou, Mississippi where she had come to feel a deep connection to the Book of Psalms. “The Tehillim [psalms] that my grandmother taught me at an early age made a profound impact on my life,” she says.

Gray, once an ordained minister, was raised in a family with a strong spiritual background. A question she and many other Jews of African American descent, including myself, say they encounter a few times a year from inquiring white Jews, is: “How did your family feel about your decision?” It is as if they ask this question expecting to hear that we were banished from our Christian families, written out of wills, never to be heard from again. I think many are shocked by the answer that our mothers encouraged our decisions, were at the root of our faith and spiritual dedication or at the least were quite supportive of our decisions – being encouraging of their children the way that all mothers should be toward their offspring.

Gray, whose birth name is Delores, even credits her mother and her grandmother as the backbone behind her strong religious identity. There were times, she says, that “I could hear my mother’s voice reverberating, ‘Delores, God is going to do something very special in your life.’”

Even when her mom’s own life was failing, Gray’s mother continued to encourage her daughter in her journey to Judaism. “How are your studies progressing?” Gray’s mother asked her on the phone one day as she was studying in Israel at a time when her mother began to feel unwell. “Just the way I expected it to be,” Gray recalls. “My mother was more concerned with my Hebrew studies than her own welfare.”

“Would you like me to come home?,” Gray asked her mother.

“No. Don’t you stop your studying! Stay there and learn,” her mother responded. “I know you love what you’re doing and you sound so happy every time we speak.”

Gray, who at the height of her career owned a Los Angeles-based travel business and led Christian tours to Israel for more than a decade, did not know at the time that her love of Israel, Judaism and the Bible would lead her to choose Judaism – let alone make aliya and move to the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem. Her revelation came one year on the Shabbat following Tisha Be’av.

“I was praying from my siddur when all of a sudden I became very emotional. I fell down prostrate in the middle of my praying and exclaimed, ‘Oh my God, I think I am a Jew!’”

She says it was as if an earthquake had hit the core of her being. “A moment of truth had touched my deepest feelings. It explained why I had undergone such emotional and religious turmoil in the past years. My neshama, my soul, was seeking the God of the Jewish people. When I finally rose to my feet I was a changed person.”

Prior to that point, Gray had stopped attending services on Sundays, and no longer observed any of the major Christian holidays. “I simply couldn’t connect with the liturgies or the sermons. The last time I attended a Christian service, I was with a friend at her place of worship. I heard the pastor say that the Jewish people had to accept the new messiah.”

Gray, who outlines her story on her Web site, www.ahuvahgray.com, and in a series of books, including her latest, Journey to the Land of My Soul, says it did not sit well with her that one religion would consider another so wrong. “My prayer was that I should be able to resolve the tug-of-war that was being waged inside me: Judaism versus Christianity.”

So to continue her journey to find an answer for herself, Gray began studying in Israel. Her mother’s main concern for her daughter as she led pilgrimages to Israel was that she had traded California’s earthquakes for flying bullets from Palestinian attacks against Israelis. But her mother was encouraging of her daughter’s transition. “We understand, Delores. You have to do God’s will. Are you still praying three times a day and reading your Bible?” She was.

Her dad was also quite supportive. “Just keep studying God’s word. Remember my motto: If you get stuck on a verse and don’t understand, stay with it and don’t go any further until you get an understanding.”

Gray’s mother, Christine Franklin Gray Buckner, was buried on December 23, 1994. Gray gave the eulogy.

Meira Leahy also credits her mother for instilling a strong spiritual faith in her that led her on the path to her own journey to Judaism, which began for her nearly 20 years ago at age 23. Leahy, who lives in a Minneapolis suburb with her husband and five kids, leads a frum and observant life. Although she had her bat mitzva after conversion as a Conservative Jew, she later took steps to also convert to Orthodoxy.

She says, “My grandmother taught me a very important lesson in prayer. She was very supportive of me. She would always tell me to pray the psalms every day. She would say that there is power in King David’s psalm. She is a very religious Christian woman and she came to my bat mitzva before I became Orthodox.”

Her mother is equally supportive. “My mom has always been a really good friend to me. When I decided I was going to become Jewish, I told my mother first. I was really surprised. I said, ‘Mom, I think I am going to become Jewish.’ She said, ‘I am not surprised. I saw this coming a long time ago.’ She said, ‘I only request one thing of you. If you think this is how God wants you to serve this world, don’t let anyone stand in your way, not your family, not the pastor at church. If you are going to do it, do it wholeheartedly.’”

That doesn’t mean that Leahy’s mom didn’t challenge the complexities of her daughter’s observant lifestyle, especially that of kashrut. One day her mom announced she was coming to visit her daughter’s house. “She said she was going to bring any food she wanted to my house because she is my mother. I let her know it was my house, I’m grown and you don’t pay rent here.”

That didn’t sit well with her mother, but her mother appreciated that her daughter stood up for her convictions. Her mom respects her daughter’s choices and has learned what she could about her daughter’s lifestyle so she can better support it.

“My mom knows when candlelighting is, when Yom Tov is; She will not call us on Shabbat. It is nice that my children’s Christian grandmother respects their Jewish identity,” says Leahy.

Leahy, 43, adds that years after her conversion, when she decided to marry her current husband Moshe Leahy, her parents were more concerned whether her husband would be decent to her, make a living, be a good father, the same thing any parent would worry about when their daughter gets married. “It is very positive coming from a ‘black perspective,’ if you want to call it that. Unfortunately it wasn’t like that with his family,” she says.

Leahy finds that white Jews seem to be the ones who have more issues with the color of her skin or that she is a convert than she or her family have. “Back when I was younger and we were first married, people would mistake me for the babysitter or they would assume my kids were adopted and they’d ask, ‘Where did you get them from.’ I’d say, ‘Hashem gave them to me’ or ‘I gave birth to them at the hospital and brought them home.’ I am comfortable in my own skin and comfortable with my own identity. And my kids are, too, because I don’t have any qualms about who I am and how I live my life.”

Courtenay Edelhart, who is biracial – the product of an African American mother and white father with Jewish ancestry – received support from her family as well. Her mother was raised African Methodist Episcopal but left the church to join the New Age movement long before Edelhart was born. Her mom meditates daily, consults psychics and believes in reincarnation. Edelhart’s paternal grandmother was a Christian Scientist and her paternal grandfather was the Jewish son of a rabbi. Her late father had no formal religious affiliation growing up and identified as an atheist, but converted to Judaism as an adult because his first wife insisted on it as a condition of marriage. The marriage only lasted a short time. He met Edelhart’s mother as he was going through a divorce.

“Their parenting philosophy was to let me and my twin sister, Ashley, choose our own spiritual path when we were old enough to decide. They never tried to impose their views on us. My sister never picked anything and is raising her children secular.”

Edelhart, 43, went to the mikve to become a Jew shortly after college, about 20 years ago.

Neither one of Edelhart’s parents, she says, believed much in following convention, or settling comfortably into the station they were born into.

“Both had overcome miserable childhoods. Both were the first members of their families to go to college. Both befriended and loved whomever they pleased in an era when few others ventured out of their cultural comfort zones. Neither of my parents thought anything at all of entering an interracial, interfaith marriage. They very much wanted my sister and me to think critically and independently, too,” she says.

“When I told my atheist, Jewish-in-name-only father I was converting to Judaism, he laughed and said mischievously, ‘What did I do wrong?’ My mother, I think, was just relieved that I hadn’t chosen Christianity. She was raised in the segregated South by a mother who called herself a devout Christian but was, in fact, a cruel, emotionally abusive woman. Christianity was, to my mother, a symbol of a past she very much wanted to leave behind.”

Edelhart, a single mom who adopted two African American children – a boy and a girl, after giving up on finding a husband (“I am too black for Ashkenazi Jews and too Jewish for Christian blacks,” she quipped), says her children, who underwent conversions by age two – will experience Judaism in a way very different from what she found when she converted as a young adult. Both of her children attended Jewish preschools that were racially diverse. The temple they belong to in California outside L.A. has a female rabbi and congregants who are black, Asian and Latino. Her daughter, eight, will attend Jewish camp this summer for the second year in a row. “She was not the only black child there last year and will not be the only black child there this year,” she says. “My son, five, is not yet old enough for camp.”

Edelhart says the only real conflict that has come from her decision to practice Judaism is Christmas. “Although my 72-year-old mother hasn’t attended church since she was a teenager, she’s a big believer in the secular aspects of Christmas. I don’t put up a tree in my home, but I participate in my family’s celebration. We gather each year at my sister’s house. I draw the line at the Santa Claus myth. I am absolutely adamant that my children will not be raised with that lie. My mother still hasn’t forgiven me for it. She thinks I’m robbing my children of the magic of the holiday season. This is something we’ll never see eye to eye on. But other than that, she fully supports my choice and is proud that I am raising my own children to know and love God.”

Sheree R. Curry, an award-winning journalist and editor of BlackandJewish.com, had a formal conversion to Judaism at the age of 18 and is supported by a mother who encouraged her daughters to choose their own religious identity. She lives in a Minneapolis suburb with her two sons. They frequent events at the local Aish Center, walking distance from their home.

 Originally published here.

South African conversion mirrors Ruth’s story

Posted May 18, 2010 Conversion No Comments

By RUTH EGLASH

Born Ellen Peters, Skolnik, who was raised as a Protestant in a “colored,” or mixed-race, family under apartheid, told The Jerusalem Post on Monday that she had always felt a connection to Judaism and that one of her earliest memories was reciting the first chapters from the story of Ruth.

“It was only after I converted that I found out that my grandfather on my mother’s side had actually been called Saul Solomon Jacob Simson,” the 54-year-old Herzliya resident said. “In addition, I had an uncle who was Jewish, and his family used to recite kiddush on Friday nights.”

Despite the obvious barriers of growing up colored in the 1950s and ’60s in South Africa, Skolnik was selected to represent the country’s non-white population in the 1973 Miss World competition held at London’s Royal Albert Hall.

“The goal was to make a point that there were groups other than whites living in South Africa,” recalled Skolnik, who was 17 at the time. “But for me it was just a great experience to see the world and meet women from all different places.”

Although she could have built a future based on her obvious physical beauty, the young woman instead decided to pursue a life based on internal beauty and spirituality: converting to Judaism, marrying an Israeli and building her home in the Jewish homeland.

“I hope that my life followed the direction of the beauty that is inside a person, and it is that which speaks to me more much more than the Miss World contest ever did,” said Skolnik, who today gives inspirational talks all over the world about her spiritual awakening and her conversion 26 years ago.

“God has a way of making people do things and there is always a reason why such things happen,” she said.

“I feel my soul was always meant to be Jewish, and there are so many things that have happened in my life to indicate this,” she went on. “I mean, even at the age of 18, before I ever thought of converting, I was wearing a Star of David necklace that had been given to me [by a Jewish family] as a present for winning the beauty contest [in South Africa].”

At the Miss World contest, too, Skolnik clearly recalls striking up a friendship with the Miss Israel contestant, who came in second place.

“I still have a newspaper article from the event where I am quoted as saying to her, “Mazal tov, I will come and visit you in Israel one day,’” laughed Skolnik.

Although it took her more than a decade, Skolnik made good on her promise and arrived in the country after meeting her Israeli-born husband Naaman during a trip to Europe. Although the two were in love, Skolnik’s husband asked her to convert so that they could be married in a Jewish ceremony.

“At first I thought that the rabbis were being racist,” recalled Skolnik of the conversion process. “When I opened my file, the rabbi gave me a very hard time, and I was running around after that file for two years. I did not realize that under Halacha, converting had to be made as difficult as possible in order for converts to understand how difficult it is to be a Jew.”

Although she eventually made it through the complicated Orthodox conversion process, it was not until an encounter with the Lubavitcher rebbe three years later that Skolnik experienced her spiritual calling.

“It was Hanukka time, and it was the turning point in my life,” she said. “I had requested the rebbe to make a blessing for me to have children. The doctors had told me that it was impossible for me to conceive, but a few months after meeting with the rebbe, I did get pregnant and gave birth to a baby girl.”

Sadly, Skolnik’s daughter died in infancy, but years later, she had the opportunity to adopt a young woman, also a convert, from China. Dvora Leah, said Skolnik, took on the family name and even named her nine-month-old daughter after Skolnik’s mother-in-law.

“I took care of my mother-in-law, Pnina, for many years as she got old, and often felt like we were Naomi and Ruth [from the Bible story],” she said, adding proudly, “Now I am a grandmother.”

Skolnik said her Judaism had become “an integral part of my life.”

“After I converted 26 years ago and became a Jew, I had not done anything and had an empty hole where I was no longer a non-Jew… I had a hole and nothing to fill it with,” she said, adding that her journey was all about filling that void and becoming fully Jewish.

“When I drive up to Jerusalem today, I feel it and I know absolutely that I have a Jewish soul now,” finished Skolnik. “When I light the Shabbat candles and then I sit down, it is at that moment I know I am a Jewish woman. I know that I am in the right place with the right people in the right land.”

Originally published here.