JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
One of the suspects identified in Tuesday’s mass shooting in Jersey City, N.J. is believed to be a onetime member of a movement called the Black Hebrew Israelites. The movement, composed of people of color — primarily African-Americans — who believe the biblical Israelites to be their forebears, has existed for over a century. Black…
Standing beneath the charred remains of their synagogue, members of Brooklyn’s Hebrew Israelite community mourned the destruction of their historic house of worship. B’nai Adah Kol Beth Israel was gutted by an accidental fire last month and the building now stands vacant and boarded up. There are gaping holes in the roof, with beams poking…
When Rabbi Capers Funnye was inaugurated to the role of Chief Rabbi of his Hebrew Israelite community, he laid out dramatic plans. One of his “highest goals” as leader of the International Israelite Board of Rabbis, he said, would be to admit women into the organization’s rabbinical academy, and allow women to serve on the…
During a community meeting on police accountability in Chicago, a prominent African-American rabbi read the names of individuals killed by the police and chanted the traditional mourners kaddish in Hebrew. Rabbi Funnye, @JCUA_News Pres, reads names of Chgoans killed by police, chants mourner’s kaddish. #ReformCPD pic.twitter.com/FR4HtRJ16i — Aryeh Bernstein (@aryehlou) April 2, 2017 Rabbi Capers…
Tamar Manasseh likely won’t be ordained as a rabbi until next year, but she already has her congregation: a street corner in the Englewood neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, where she has worked out her own solution to the city’s gun violence problem. Every afternoon during the Chicago Public Schools summer vacation, Manasseh and what…
The actor Ato Essandoh is taking on a particularly challenging role in the new NBC drama “Chicago Med,” which centers around life in an emergency room. He not only has to learn how to convincingly play a cardiothoracic surgeon — Essandoh also has to take on the role of an Orthodox Jew. “His head is…
In sermons, Rabbi Capers Funnye quotes from spirituals and the Talmud, from Abraham Joshua Heschel and from black nationalist Marcus Garvey. It’s a preaching style well suited for Funnye’s role as the newly installed chief rabbi of the International Israelite Board of Rabbis — the main rabbinical body in the Hebrew Israelite community. And it…
The ordination took place on a sun-drenched Sabbath, in a synagogue used many decades ago by Lithuanian Jews. But on June 23, it was 200 mostly black worshippers, many in brightly colored African dress, who were on their feet, eyes fixed on a procession of eight white-robed rabbis with ceremonial miters crowning their heads as…
