Members of the Tribe

by Zev Chafets

  That evening I got a call from a man named Zakiahu Levy, who invited me to attend Sabbath morning services at Beth Elohim, his shul on Linden Boulevard in St. Albans, Queens. “When you get there just tell the shammes you talked to me and it’ll be cool,” he said.

  Feeling foolish, I asked him if a jacket and tie were the appropriate dress. “Yeah,” he said. “Jacket and tie are fine. We dress western, we’re a Talmudic congregation. Just be sure you bring your kippah [the Hebrew word for skullcap]. You got a kippah, dontcha?” I assured him that I did, and thanked him for his help. “Happy to do it,” he said. “Shabbat shalom.”

  I went out to Queens expecting to find a sect. Israel has a group of “Black Hebrews” from America, led by a charismatic preacher named Ben Ami Carter, who claims that the original Hebrews of the Bible were black, and that modern blacks are, ipso facto, the real Jews. This philosophy has not won him many Israeli supporters; and the Black Hebrews, who entered the country illegally as tourists, live a separate communal life in a couple of Israel’s less attractive desert towns.

  The Black Hebrews of Israel do not practice Judaism. Their religion consists of homemade rules and rituals—polygamy, vegetarianism, and strict abstinence from alcohol, drugs, and tobacco. The men dress in white, the women wear long robes and cover their heads with turbans. The members all have Hebrew names bestowed by Ben Ami Carter that are said to express each person’s personality and character traits. The sect has only one holiday—Appreciation Day (“You just invite anyone you appreciate,” a member of the group once told me). Ben Ami Carter, who considers himself the Messiah and tools around in a large Cadillac surrounded by admiring Hebrew sisters, is the most appreciated man in the group.

  That’s more or less what I expected to find on Linden Boulevard. Instead I entered a storefront synagogue that reminded me of the small shuls that dot Jerusalem’s downtown. Beth Elohim (the House of God) is a one-room chapel arranged in the Orthodox way—men’s section in front, women’s in the rear. Wooden pews face a small platform. On the far wall is a simple ark, and above it an eternal light. A door on the side of the chapel opens to a flight of stairs leading to some basement classrooms. On the door is a sign that reads TALMUD TORAH.

  Although it was past ten when I arrived, the chapel was almost empty. A dark-suited usher wished me “Shabbat shalom,” discreetly peeked at my head to make sure I was wearing a yarmulke, and then showed me to a seat in the front row. I told him I had been invited by Zakiahu Levy and he nodded his recognition. “You’re welcome here,” he said reassuringly, and he left me alone on the hard wooden bench.

  I heard a rustling in back of me and turned to see three stout ladies sitting in the women’s section. All three wore pastel print dresses, held prayer books in white-gloved hands, and covered their heads with bonnetlike hats. Although the women’s section was otherwise empty, they sat shoulder to shoulder, as if they were joined together. I smiled at them. They smiled and called out, “Shabbat shalom.”

  Gradually members of the congregation began straggling in. The men wore dark business suits, prayer shawls, and knitted yarmulkes or hats; the women covered their heads with hats or scarves and wore festive dresses. The only whites other than myself were a woman who accompanied her husband and teenage daughters and an old lady who looked like she had wandered in to get out of the cold.

  While we waited for the service to begin, I leafed through the prayerbook that had been laying on my seat. Beth Elohim uses the Chasidic edition published by Mercaz L’Inyonei Chinuch, Inc., of Brooklyn. The book contained the standard Orthodox service in Hebrew, along with an English translation.

  A few minutes before eleven, Rabbi Levi Ben Levi and Cantor Nathaniel Davis entered the room and took their places on the platform. Ben Levi is a dark-skinned, rotund man with a studious, somewhat stiff demeanor. He wore a black robe and white tallis, and he nodded to the congregation in solemn greeting. Ben Levi, I later learned, is the spiritual leader not only of Beth Elohim but of its sister congregation in Harlem.

  The rabbi began by sternly admonishing his flock to come on time in the future (“We on CPT in this shul,” whispered a man sitting next to me. “You know—Colored People’s Time”); then the cantor, Nathaniel Davis, began to chant the service in a warm, thick baritone. Like Ben Levi he wore a black robe and white tallis, but instead of a regular yarmulke he had on a high black hat like the ones worn by Eastern European cantors.

  Davis’s melodies were heavily tinged with gospel influence, and they went remarkably well with the ancient Hebrew prayers. He studied cantorial music with the renowned Josef Malovany of the Fifth Avenue Synagogue in New York, and he is familiar with traditional liturgical music. “I can doven [pray] Ashkenazi style,” he told me after the service, “but our people prefer the down-home sound.” Down home for the Jews of Linden Boulevard is Mississippi, not Minsk.

  Beth Elohim has about 250 members and, judging from the people at services that morning, almost all of them can read Hebrew. They joined in the responsive readings and mumbled along with the cantor like old pros in any shul in the world. But from time to time someone shouted “Hallelujah!” and once or twice a lady in back loudly sighed, “Amen, ain’t my Lord somethin’!”

  It was a kind of soul Yiddishkeit that reminded me of the fervor of Chasidic synagogues. Later, Davis complained that it had been a quiet morning. Rabbi Ben Levi’s son, who plays the piano, was away at Yale, and several of the women who normally beat on tambourines weren’t at services. “You wanna hear something, you come by on Simchas Torah. Man, we really rock the shul,” the cantor said proudly.

  The story of black Jews in America is shrouded in mystery, confusion, and self-interested inaccuracy. A few claim descent from Jewish slave masters. Some are converts or the children of converts. And others have simply decided, more or less on their own, that they are Jews.

  Some black Jews belong to mainstream synagogues, but most are members of various black congregations, which are divided along doctrinal lines. “Eastern” black Jews, such as the Ben Ami Carter group in Israel, are sects that believe all blacks are Hebrews. They usually dress in African or Arab garb, use Hebrew in their prayers, mix Christian, Moslem, and Jewish theology and ritual, celebrate holidays with self-ordained customs, and feel no connection to white Jews.

  Beth Elohim, on the other hand, calls itself a Talmudic synagogue, which means it practices traditional Judaism. It is not strictly Orthodox—its members ride to synagogue on the Sabbath, and at the service a collection plate is passed around—but ritually it is unmistakably Jewish. The only specific nod to race is the rabbi’s prayer, given before his sermon, for the peace of “Eretz Yisrael, Eretz Africa, and Eretz America—the lands of Israel, Africa, and America.”

  And yet, emotionally the congregation is very much within the holiness tradition of the black church. Its members are poor people, working class and lucky to be. They come to synagogue for only one reason—they need spiritual fortification to get through very hard lives. Black religion is God-oriented, and black Judaism is no exception.

  In his sermon that morning, Rabbi Ben Levi spoke about the need for purity and obedience to God’s law. “To be a good Jew, you got to do three things. You got to eat right—I’m talking about kosher food now. You got to think right—I’m talking about Torah thoughts, the word of God—can I get an amen? And you got to do right—I’m talking about the commandments of the ‘kodosh boruchu,’ God almighty.”

  A murmured amen followed each one of Ben Levi’s three principles and he beamed avuncularly at the congregation. “Now, I know that there are people here this morning whose lives aren’t going just like they want them to. There are people here today who are in pain, people suffering physically, mentally, emotionally. But I want you to know one thing—you do right and God’s gonna do right, too. You take a step toward him and he’s going to take two steps toward you. If you eat right and think right and do right, God’s going to see to it that your bank book is balanced at the
end of the month! God’s going to keep you on your job! God’s going to help you find the strength to carry on, to take care of your families, and meet your obligations, yes he is, say amen!”

  A few weeks earlier, in Jacksonville, Florida, I had met a young Reform rabbi named Michael Matuson, who claimed to detect a new spiritual hunger among his congregants. “People here have everything,” he told me. “Materially they can’t even think of things to want anymore. But a lot of them are desperate for awe. At services on Friday nights I invite them up to the Torah. I tell them, ‘If you’ve had an experience during the week that needs spiritual transformation, touch the Torah and meditate on it.’ You’d be surprised how many people are moved by it.

  “The people in a congregation like this want to believe in a myth,” Matuson said. “The problem is, most of them don’t believe in God. And to tell you the truth, most rabbis don’t believe in God, either—at least not the second grade notion of some old man sitting on a cloud.”

  Rabbi Ben Levi and his congregation believe. Their God can balance your checkbook, cares what you eat for dinner, rewards the righteous and punishes the sinner. It is a primitive kind of religion, close to the roots of Judaism. “American Jews don’t feel comfortable with verbal affirmations of God’s glory,” Ben Waldman, Pat Robertson’s advisor, had told me in Washington. “We’re a more subtle religion than that.” But in synagogues filled with poor people, God is more than just an abstraction. The Jews of Beth Elohim reminded me of people I had seen at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, slipping prayers between the cracks with tears in their eyes.

  After his sermon, Rabbi Ben Levi introduced me as a visitor from Israel and invited me to say a few words. I stood facing the congregation, which had grown to about sixty during the service, and was greeted by shouts of “Praise God!” and “Jerusalem!” For a brief, adrenaline-crazed moment I was tempted to launch into an imitation of Prophet Jones, a holiness preacher who was a boyhood idol of mine in Detroit. Instead, I told them how comfortable I felt in their synagogue and mentioned that I was writing a book about American Jews that would certainly include them. Several people shouted “Praise God,” but Rabbi Ben Levi seemed a bit disconcerted. “You are very welcome among us,” he intoned, and then somewhat cryptically added, “my life is an open book.”

  Cantor Davis ended the service with a chillingly beautiful rendition of “Yerushalaim Shel Zahav (Jerusalem of Gold),” an anthem of the Six-Day War. In Israel the song is a cliché, the kind of thing small children sing in talent shows; but Davis’s version—half Yossele Rosenblatt, half Sam Cooke—had the whole synagogue swaying and clapping.

  After services one of the women I had seen when I first came in approached me. “You’re from Israel,” she said, “maybe you know my son Shlomo? He’s at the Tel Aviv University.” I told her I didn’t, but promised to call and say hello when I got back home. The lady smiled, took my hand in hers, fingers curved as if she were holding a golf club, and pumped my arm. “Shabbat shalom to you,” she said. A few handshakes later I realized that the grip is part of the Beth Elohim ritual.

  I wanted to talk to some of the members of the congregation, but although they were uniformly friendly, shaking my hand until it hurt and wishing me “Shabbat shalom,” none was willing to be interviewed. “You better ask Rabbi about that,” was the standard answer, and Rabbi Ben Levi didn’t want to talk.

  “I’d like to have a discussion, but I can’t do it on the Shabbat. I restrict myself to holy thoughts on the Shabbat,” he said as we stood on the street in front of the synagogue, surrounded by a small knot of worshippers. He told me to call him at his office for an appointment (I did, but he never returned my calls), gave me a Beth Elohim handshake, and headed down Linden Boulevard.

  Rabbi Ben Levi’s departure left me standing on the sidewalk with Marshall and Gladys, a mixed couple. Gladys comes from a Jewish family in Kew Gardens and teaches Hebrew school at Beth Elohim. Her husband works for the city in a capacity he declined to specify. A light-skinned man with serious eyes and an earnest manner, he had appeared, in the synagogue, to be elegantly dressed. Now, in the sunlight of Linden Boulevard, I saw that his overcoat was threadbare and his shoes were slightly cracked. He wore a porkpie hat, and he noticed I was bareheaded.

  “Ah, excuse my question, but you from Israel. That means you a Jew, right?” I acknowledged that I was. “Well, not meaning any disrespect, why is it that your head is uncovered?”

  It seemed a strange question—there are hundreds of thousands of bare-headed Jews in New York. Maybe, I thought, they don’t look Jewish to Marshall.

  “I’m a secular Jew,” I told him. “I’m not religious.”

  Marshall gazed at me in frank appraisal. “Now, when you say you not religious, you keep the laws of kashrut, don’t you? Don’t be telling me you eat pork products in Jerusalem?”

  It sounded pretty bad when he put it that way and suddenly I felt defensive. “I do sometimes, yes. It’s not all that easy to find them, of course, and usually I don’t, but …”

  As I talked I saw the expression on Marshall’s face change from friendly curiosity to alarm. It was there in his eyes: This man don’t eat right, which means he don’t think right, and he probably don’t do right. He cast a nervous glance at his teenage daughters.

  I wanted to reassure him, tell him there are plenty of good Jews in the world who do right even though they don’t keep every commandment or even believe in God. I had examples; it’s an old argument. But I left it alone. Marshall and the other members of Beth Elohim aren’t interested in Jewish sociology. They are poor people, Jews with the blues. God is a necessity, not a debating point. So I gave Marshall the secret handshake, wished him and his wife a Shabbat shalom, and headed toward the subway and Manhattan.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  HARD CORE

  A few days after my visit to Beth Elohim I took a train down to the Lower East Side of Manhattan to see Warren Feierstein again. I had been on the road for months by now, and had met a bewildering array of Jews—crawfish eaters and politicians, yuppies and welfare cases—all the way from the Succah in the Sky to the lesbian Havdalah hot tub. They had only one thing in common—they seemed like Jewish Americans. Now I wanted to meet American Jews, the hard core who still cling to the old Eastern European attitudes and traditions. Feierstein, who grew up on the Lower East Side, suggested I start in his neighborhood.

  When I found him in his office at the Metropolitan Council on Poverty, his desk was stacked high with official-looking papers, and a walkie-talkie crackled from a shelf. Feierstein gestured at the receiver. “I’m a member of Hatzollah,” he said proudly. “And we’re always on duty.”

  If you have the misfortune to need an ambulance in New York City, it could take as much as forty-five minutes for one to reach you. But if you are Jewish and live on the Lower East Side or in certain neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Queens, or the Bronx, you can do a lot better than that. Call the right number, ask for help—in Yiddish, Hebrew, or English—and Hatzollah, the Jewish volunteer ambulance corps, will be at your door within ten minutes. “We’re like the Red Magen David,” Warren said, naming Israel’s national emergency first aid service. “Except, with all due respect, I think we’re a little more efficient.”

  Hatzollah was not established only for the sake of efficiency, however. “There are a lot of people in our community who don’t know English well, and they have a hard time communicating with paramedics,” Feierstein explained. “And let’s face it, a lot of them, when they need help, they want to see a Jewish face, to feel like they’re with their own people.”

  This is the essence of the Lower East Side mentality. There are about thirty thousand Jews left in the neighborhood—shopkeepers and blue collar workers, teachers and social workers, gentle Hebraists and karate-chopping Jewish Defense League militants—and they are indivisibly Jewish. They don’t need trips to Israel or UJA sensitivity sessions to tell them they are different from their fellow Americans. To them assim
ilation is a dirty word and the opportunities of the United States a mixed blessing.

  Warren strapped on his walkie-talkie and took me out for a tour of his neighborhood. We walked along East Broadway, a street lined with kosher restaurants, religious bookstores, and more synagogues per capita than any other place in America. On one block, between Clinton and Montgomery, I counted twenty shuls and yeshivot—all of them Orthodox. Feierstein told me there isn’t a single Reform or Conservative congregation in the neighborhood, a claim not even the Chasidic strongholds of Borough Park and Crown Heights can make.

  By far the most influential religious institution on the block is the Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem Yeshiva, which was the home base of the late Rabbi Moshe Feinstein. Reb Moshe was the most respected rabbi of his generation, and on the Lower East Side his word was law. It was he, for example, who protected kosher butchers by outlawing self-service meat markets, and although he died a few years ago, the edict has survived. There aren’t many spiritual leaders in America of any denomination with that kind of posthumous clout.

  Not even Reb Moshe was able to preserve the ethnic homogeneity of the Lower East Side, however. The Forvitz Building, once the home of America’s most influential Yiddish newspaper, is now the Ling Liang Building. Israel’s Bank Leumi’s sign is written in Hebrew and Mandarin. Not long ago, a small shul on the corner of Clinton and East Broadway was prevented by rabbinical court decree from selling out to a Buddhist shrine. But despite these incursions, the Lower East Side remains Jewish turf, an island of grass roots tradition and community.

  If the rabbis hold the religious reins in the neighborhood, its corporeal power center is the Harry S. Truman Regular Democratic Club on East Broadway. Fittingly, its clubhouse is located in the basement of a Talmudic academy. At sundown the round-shouldered yeshiva boys go home and the little building is taken over by a more worldly group of men.