Black Hebrew Israelites are groups of Black African Americans who consider themselves to be descendant of the original Israelite people and lost Jewish Tribes of Israel. Generally speaking, the Black Hebrew groups will follow some of the religious beliefs from…
Hebrew Israelites
The Latest
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News Black Israelites Stand with Black Lives Matter Amid Turmoil — but ‘God Comes First’
In recent weeks, America’s racial wounds have been torn open, an uneasy rhythm of violence playing out in the streets and on social media: African-Americans shot dead on camera by police, protests rolling through cities and police killed in apparent retaliatory shootings. Like many African American congregations, members of the century-old black Hebrew Israelite movement…
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News Hebrew Israelites Celebrate Rabbi Who Founded Their Century-Old Movement
This weekend black Israelites will gather across New York City to celebrate their spiritual patriarch — a rabbi from Harlem who helped establish America’s black Hebrew-Israelite movement a century ago. “We thank the Most High for our beloved Chief Rabbi Matthew,” community member Deborah Reuben wrote online. “Chief Rabbi Matthew will always be remembered [as]…
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News ‘Joining Fabric of World Jewish Community,’ 100 Convert on African Island of Madagascar
More than 100 men and women converted to Judaism in Madagascar this month, a historic first for the large island nation off the southeast coast of Africa. The May conversions, organized by Kulanu, a volunteer-run American nonprofit founded in the 1990s to support “isolated and emerging Jewish communities” worldwide, was the product of years of…
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The Schmooze On Jerusalem Walls, Artist Memorializes Black Rabbi from Harlem
When Rabbi Mordecai Herman would visit the Lower East Side of the 1920s, then teeming with Jewish immigrants from Europe, he cut an intriguing figure. He was a wizened black rabbi and former sailor from Harlem who spoke Hebrew, some Yiddish, and was a pioneering spiritual leader of the early black Israelite movement. Now, nearly…
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News Can This Rabbinic Revolutionary Make Hebrew Israelites Mainstream?
Like synagogues in many old neighborhoods, the walls of Mount Horeb in the Bronx are lined with the framed photos of esteemed elders who have passed on. There is a faded photo, too, of the Western Wall, and Stars of David. But at this Bronx synagogue, an Ethiopian flag also hangs above a series of…
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The Schmooze Antoine Dodson Declares Himself "A Hebrew Israelite"
Kevin Antoine Dodson, known throughout the world as “The Bed Intruder Song Guy,” is apparently “no longer into homosexuality” and has declared himself a “True Chosen Hebrew Israelite.” How the two are related remains dubious at best. Dodson — who rose to viral Youtube fame in 2010 when a news clip of him describing a…
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News Black Jews Gain Wider Acceptance
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…
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Opinion Al Sharpton Winks at Rabbi Heschel
In what is the closest he will probably ever come to an apology, Al Sharpton (onetime firebrand turned soon-to-be MSNBC host) writes in today’s Daily News about his conduct during the Crown Heights riots that “our language and tone sometimes exacerbated tensions and played to the extremists rather than raising the issue of the value…
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