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.”

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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.

“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.”