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Shaarei Shamayim, a small shul with a big heart, welcomes all Jews from diverse backgrounds.
Hosaha Levy felt that he had a Jewish soul even before converting to Judaism many years ago. He also had a Jewish name.
“My name is not a name change. It’s always been my name,” declares the president of Atlanta’s Shaarei Shamayim synagogue where he is among the 50 percent of the congregants with African-American roots.
The rabbi, Mark Hillel Kunis, describes his congregation as a boutique shul that is welcoming and nonjudgmental. “We have people in our congregation who have heard about Judaism, who had a distant relative who was Jewish, or who have read about Judaism and want to know more,” he says.
Hosaha Levy at shul with his grandson Jacob
The melting pot at Shaarei Shamayim dispels the myth that all members of the tribe are Ashkenazic Jews with roots from Central and Eastern Europe. “Every soul is a holy soul in the image of God,” Rabbi Kunis emphasizes.
In 2020 a Pew Research Center survey of demographic trends in the U.S. and the world found that 8% of Jews identify as Black, Hispanic, Asian, another race or multiracial. As Levy can attest, their stories of finding the path to Judaism are as individual as they are.
His father died when Levy was just 18 months old. His grandfather, Augustus, was a deacon at a Baptist church and suggested the name Hosaha. “He loved the book of Hosea, which teaches us about God’s unwavering faithfulness.”
Reared by his mother in a Pennsylvania steel mill town where Jews lived, prayed and ran businesses, Levy had interesting experiences due to his name. As an example, he recalls, “I went for a job at a soda factory. The lady thought, ‘We’re going to get a nice little Jewish boy.’ She looked up and saw me and said, ‘Whoa! ’” The black gentile man was not what she was expecting.
Coming of age in the 1960s, Levy remembers being part of what he calls “an awakening of black folks wanting to find out about their roots.” A friend from high school who belonged to an African-American synagogue in Harlem introduced him to Judaism.
When Levy, age 25, walked into the New York synagogue in 1976, every fiber of his being felt at home. He has practiced Judaism ever since.
Hosaha with his grandson Jacob celebrating his bar mitzvah
“I came to Atlanta in 1989. I was still observing Judaism but hadn’t gone through conversion. I’d still maintained association with black rabbis in New York. They said I owed my two children a Jewish education. At that point my wife, Darlene, and I went synagogue shopping.”
They walked into a traditional synagogue of 800 families, led at that time by Rabbi Kunis. A congregant named Toni Brown walked up to the Levys and said, “I’m going to take the kids to junior congregation. You go on in to services.”
The warm welcome touched Hosaha and Darlene. “That was the first synagogue we went to where someone actually greeted us!” he says.
Rabbi Kunis, far right, with Hosaha Levy behind him, carrying the Torahs to Shaarei Shamayim’s new building September 2016
When members of that synagogue voted to become a more liberal, egalitarian congregation, Rabbi Kunis told them that as an Orthodox rabbi he could no longer serve them. Several of the more traditional members—including the Levys and Toni Brown’s family—broke away to form a new synagogue with Rabbi Kunis at the helm. They launched Shaarei Shamayim on Purim in 2002.
Kunis, who grew up as an Ashkenazic Jew in Brooklyn, candidly remembers: “My family didn’t want to leave Atlanta. It was a blow to my ego, initially, going from 800 families to 30 families.”
But as the years have progressed his boutique shul has quadrupled in size and attracted a mosaic of souls, including African-American converts as well as formerly unaffiliated Hispanic and Israeli Jews.
“We are honored to have them,” says the rabbi. “When we started Shaarei Shamayim we made a greater effort to get them involved in synagogue leadership. There’s a network in the Atlanta area of black Jews and blacks who are interested in Judaism and word started to spread. Some of them had been meeting by themselves but not knowing exactly what to do.
Hosaha's wife, Darlene, Andye Zell and Aminah Perkins
“I make clear to all of them money is no barrier to belonging to Shaarei Shamayim and educating their children in our religious school. People are enthusiastic. I can’t tell you how exciting it is to convert a family of four or six all at once. The excitement on their faces—it doesn’t go away.”
The congregation recently honored him with a dinner to celebrate his 50th year in the rabbinate. He clearly has found his mission. When will he retire? “When it stops being fun.”
Rabbi Mark Hillel Kunis
Says Kunis, the author of Dancing with God: How to Connect with God Every Time You Pray, “I see and feel Shaarei Shamayim is where I need to be. God placed me here for a reason. Part of that reason is to be a spiritual portal to those seeking the light of God and Torah.”
This may be surprising or unique for Americans, but here in Israel Jews come in every different color and no one is very surprised by it. There are very black Jews from Ethiopia, lighter black/African Jews from Yemen and other middle eastern countries, Asian Jews, white Jews from Eastern Europe, and all shades in between. American Jews have been separated from real, traditional Judaism and other Jews for so long that they have forgotten that the Jewish world is a very large and varied one.
The Middle East is part of Asia, so all Jews by birth are part Asian.
Black is beautiful!
Interesting and progressive orthodox congregationI
I hope i can find a congregation like this in new york upstates new york.
When the Jews left Israel and were dispersed, they looked like Arabs.
When they came back, they looked like Europeans.
Just goes to show that there have been massive waves of conversions to Judaism.
Wrong. DNA tests prove that most Jews are close to 100% ashkenize or sephardi.This blondini is one of them
You talk as if conversions to Judaism are a bad thing.
By Arabs do you mean the original people of Arabia who were an Afro/ Mediterranean people who didn't look any different than the Ethiopian / Yemenite population they shared land and culture with? Or do you mean the paler people from the North/ Turkic area who migrated down INTO North East Africa and usurped the identity of "Arab" despite NOT having an origin in Arabia? There is nothing in documented Jewish history or tradition outside of modern Euro-centric propaganda that suggests that ancient Israel/ Jews looked like those paler hairier people from North and Central Asia and Eastern Europe like Turkiye etc. I do agree with you, there have been massive waves of conversion to Judaism over the centuries, which is where the bulk of Jews today and the last centuries come from.
While I appreciate the sentiment, one, not all Jews of color are converts, and two, the percentage of non-caucasian Jews is much higher than 8% outside of the U.S. and probably higher within! The fact that there is a "myth" that all Jews are of Ashkenazi descent which has been perpetrated by Ashkenazi Jews needs to be dispelled and more showing of those of us Jews who ARE here and ain't going nowhere! Let's also erase the white culture of "Jewish food," which there is no such thing as Jews come from ALL regions of the world, yet our food is represented by gefilte fish, bagels and lox, brisket, stuffed cabbage, matzah ball soup and kugel; most of which the majority of the Jews over the world never wat or even heard of!
You are applying US racial labels to communities. It's irrelevant. In Israel there are plenty of families of both Ashkenazim & Mizrahim that have a spectrum of colour just among siblings. No one here calls a Jew "white" or "Caucasian." The only thing that matters is (was) COMMUNITY. What community do you belong to. And there has been so much intermarriage among the different communities that most people are mixtures & NOBODY CARES! The same is true of FOOD in Israel where ASHKENAZIM, even chassidim, ALWAYS, for example, HAVE TEHINA at their events.
According to pasted history like during the Holocaust, Jews were considered non white, technically Jews are not white anyway, even though Askenzi Jews look white, Jews are Semitic which is non white Avraham was actually from modern day Iraq, which is Mizarchi or Sephardic in my view
There were no such labels then!
I like the Mizrachi label
I told my mother-in-law Jews weren't white and she flipped out. She insisted she was white and when I asked her to prove it she just stared at me.
Whiteness is an artificial socio-economic construct, not a matter of ethnicity or genetics. At some point in the last 100 years, European Jews / Ashkenazim have BECOME "White" once they were allowed to. There's a book about it called "How the Jews became White Folks and what that says about Race in America". Ashkenazim are Europeans.
"Semitic" is a fabrication. The only things "Semitic" are languages. What people can legitimately trace their origins to Shem? There were no Mizrachi or Sephardic people when Avraham was living.
My family and I are Ashkenaz. My mother was born in Hungary. She said she never heard of a bagel until she came to the US after WWll,
Though it's unfortunately true that too many Ashkenazi Jews are biased, this can be said of Sephardi Jews as well (ironically, especially in Israel).
Both groups are proud of their minhagim (customs /. tradition), as they should be, and it's only small-minded people who turn this potentially rich tapestry of culture into a contest of sorts.
Your description of typical Jewish food is similarly inaccurate. A possible reason that gefilte fish represents Jewish cuisine is precisely because it's uniquely Jewish (look into its history), while much of Sephardi food is based exclusively on Arab cooking.
Let's work on achdus (unity) instead of divisiveness!
I made aliyah almost five years ago, and really miss my Black friends and their unique energy.
There must be Ethiopian Jews that are dark, and also a lot of Sephardic and Mizrachi, and Yemenite Jews are dark, they will all have the same unique energy like you had in America
Absolutely BEAUTIFUL! We all have so much to learn from this ! Thank you for sharing your hearts with us.
There is a long story of black Jews, begining with one of Moshe's Wifes, Salomon Wife's, The rescuer of Prophet Jeremiah and more.
And there is a long story of converts, from Ruth, the Moabite women, some sons of Haman to Onkelos the Convert, who translated the Bible to Aramaic.
Also Rabbi Akiva came from converts too
Black Jews didn't BEGIN with Moses' wife. It began with Shem. lol There is nothing in the Torah indicating that Moshe's wife looked any different than he did. Only that she was from a different nation (not color or ethnicity) of people. Both the Hebrew people and the Moabites (descendants of Noah) were the descendants of SHEM, whom Rabbi Eleazar ben Hyrcanus described as "black and lovely" and his brother Ham as "black as the raven". The story of "black Jews" is the origin story of the Jews in Egypt who could not be distinguished from the Egyptian descendants of Ham (Yosef's brother thought he was an Egyptian) , nor from Ham's Canaanite descendants (Ya'akov's burial procession documents this). Please throw the Eurocentric narrative of Jews away. It doesn't reflect the truth of Judaism.