Black Hebrew Israelites Celebrate Rabbi Who Founded Their Century-Old MovementPosted in Articles, Judaism, Media Archive, Religion, United States on 2016-06-25 01:26Z by Steven |
Black Hebrew Israelites Celebrate Rabbi Who Founded Their Century-Old Movement
Forward
2016-06-24
Sam Kestenbaum, Staff Writer
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] a teacher, a scholar of the Torah, a builder and a great leader in Yisrael.”
The three-day event is held every year to honor the Caribbean-born Rabbi Wentworth Arthur Matthew, who founded a synagogue in Harlem in 1919 and taught that black Americans had ancestral ties to the ancient Israelites and that they should return to this Hebraic way of life…
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