Former Black Americans Now ‘Hebrew Israelites’

DIMONA, Israel —  At a candlelight Sabbath service, worshipers sway back and forth, clapping and singing gospel hymns in Hebrew and English.

“You feel all right on this Shabbas night,” a woman sings out. “Yes,” the congregation responds in Hebrew tinged with the drawl of the American South.

The service--more Baptist revival meeting than Jewish Sabbath service--is at the “Kingdom of Yah,” a community of American blacks who have settled in the development town of Dimona in the southern Negev Desert.

Thirty years have passed since the original 39 pilgrims, led by Chicago bus driver Ben Ammi, arrived in the Holy Land. Today they number 2,500. They call themselves the Hebrew Israelites, but are known in Israel as the Black Hebrews.

Despite a turbulent, often hostile relationship with Israeli authorities, the community has prospered at a sprawling former absorption center for immigrants and even won some grudging recognition.

Members, who refer to their compound as the kfar, Hebrew for village, produce and sell tofu ice cream, grow their own food and sew their own clothes.

The singers in the community’s gospel choir are sought-after performers, and two Black Hebrews make up half of the boy band Eden, which represented Israel in Europe’s largest song contest last year.

Sitting in the center of the kfar under a sparkling desert sun and sporting a long linen robe, community member Ohmahn Ben Eliazer says he’s happy he came to Israel in 1978. He says the community’s biggest accomplishment has been to raise a new generation far from America’s legacy of racism and violence.

“My son just turned 17 years, and he’s never been a pallbearer for one of his friends,” Ben Eliazer says, referring to the gang killings in America’s inner cities.

The movement’s founder, Ammi, believed that black Americans descended from the Israelite tribe of Judah. He said they migrated to West Africa after the destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in AD 70 and were eventually sold as slaves to the United States.

In 1966, Ammi began gathering residents of Chicago’s ghettos and middle-class neighborhoods and led them to Liberia, the West African republic settled by freed slaves in the 19th century. They moved to Israel in 1969 to seek the sense of identity America had withheld.

“The vision that caused me to leave, I’ve never regretted,” says Mocksheriel Ben Yehuda, who left the U.S. 25 years ago.

When the Hebrew Israelites arrived in Israel, they were sent to live in crowded public housing in Dimona--a melting pot for immigrants in the south of the country.

The Israeli government didn’t know what to make of the newcomers who adopted Hebrew names and a West African style of dress and said they were neither Jews nor Christians. Over the years they’ve been mocked as cultists and “kushim,” a derogatory Hebrew term for blacks.

Although several of the Hebrew Israelites had advanced degrees, available jobs ranged from menial labor to selling incense sticks on Tel Aviv street corners. They didn’t qualify for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return, which grants Jews automatic citizenship, and some were deported.

Relations between the government and the community slowly improved. In 1980 the government gave the Hebrew Israelites the abandoned immigrant absorption center on condition they rehabilitate it.

In a 1990 deal, the community’s members were given permission to stay indefinitely, provided immigration of more blacks from the United States stopped. A few years later, the Hebrew Israelites were granted permanent residency but not citizenship. A public school for the community’s children opened across the street from the compound in 1992.

Life in the crowded compound-- four or five families often live in a single apartment--centers around the community. Children eat their meals together in the kfar’s cafeteria. Residents are vegetarians, and smoking is discouraged.

While polygamy is permitted-- Ammi, the founder, has four wives--there is no promiscuity. The Hebrew Israelites say they have chosen a way of life dedicated to serving Yah, or God. They address each other as “saint.”

Many in the community say that they have no desire to go back to the United States and that the black liberation movement back home has failed.

“We’ve tried economics, religion, politics--all of these have shown to be illusion,” says Hacomliel Hacohen, one of the 17 priests in the community.

The first children born in Israel have come of age. They speak Hebrew fluently, albeit with thick American accents. Some have gone to college. All are ready for Israeli citizenship, should it ever be offered, including the compulsory military service that comes with it.

The youngsters say there is little chance they will leave the community. Yovalla Baht Israel, 21, who is studying for her Israeli high school diploma, has never visited the United States.

“This is what I’ve known,” says Baht Israel, who grew up in a home with her parents and her father’s two other wives. “The [lifestyle] is nothing I’d leave. It’s a wonderful life.”