Members of the Tribe (20 page)

In New York, the capital of Jewish America, the situation is a little different. There, too, the great majority of Jews have reached
the middle class and beyond. But unlike other American cities, New York also has a significant Jewish poverty class. A recent poll conducted by the UJA revealed eighty thousand Jewish families in the city with an annual income of less than $10,000, and another one hundred and ten thousand households with an income of less than $20,000 a year. Experts believe that there are three hundred thousand Jews in the New York area who qualify as poor—roughly fifteen percent of the total Jewish population.

Many of the poor Jews are Chasidim with huge families and little secular education. Others are old men and women on fixed incomes, or people out of work—perhaps as many as one hundred thousand in the metropolitan area, according to Jewish poverty workers.

At the bottom of the barrel are an estimated fifteen hundred homeless Jews, street people who sleep in the open and carry their belongings with them in shopping bags or on their backs. Warren Feierstein, who runs the Metropolitan New York Coordinating Council on Poverty for the Jewish Federation, has spent his professional life dealing with these people. A soft-spoken man in his mid-thirties, Feierstein is a realist who grew up on New York’s Lower East Side. To him, Jewish poverty is both natural and inevitable.

“You have Jewish hookers and Jewish beggars in Israel, why shouldn’t we have them here?” he asked reasonably when we met at the Stratford Arms Hotel. “Jews are just people like everybody else. There are strong ones and weak ones. Our job is to help the ones who can’t help themselves.”

Despite the logic of this approach, poor Jews are something of an embarrassment to the establishment. For years it was difficult to convince the federation to face the issue of Jewish poverty with any seriousness. This changed when Mayor Ed Koch, himself a Jew, publicly berated the community for its indifference. “The third floor of the Stratford Arms is our answer to Koch,” Feierstein said.

Nestled between the brownstones on West 70th between Columbus and Broadway, the Stratford Arms looks like a typical Upper West Side residential hotel. But when we went inside that morning it was immediately obvious that the hotel specializes in
people with nowhere else to go. The lobby was bare of furniture, and patrons sat on the uncarpeted floor, drinking steaming coffee from white styrofoam cups. Others leaned aimlessly against peeling walls and stared into space. From time to time an unshaven man erupted into barks of unprompted laughter. At the desk, a red-nosed clerk regarded the scene with utter disinterest. Even the candy bars in the lobby’s vending machine were crumpled and stale, chocolate-covered reminders of the pervasiveness of poverty.

The Stratford Arms’s clientele is made up of people of all races and religions, but the third floor is its Jewish neighborhood. The floor has been taken over by the Metropolitan Council on Poverty, and it serves as a shelter for a shifting collection of misfits and losers. “We had a family of six—a couple with four kids—who drove all the way up here from Florida,” Warren told me, as we ascended in the rickety elevator. “He was a factory worker out of a job, and they didn’t know what else to do. Poor people have always migrated to New York from the South, why shouldn’t Jews?”

The corridor of the third floor reeked of industrial cleanser, stale whisky, and stale cigarettes. A woman in a tattered bathrobe passed us in the hall without looking up, but otherwise the floor was deserted. “It’s too early for a lot of them; they’re still sleeping,” Warren told me. I looked at my watch and saw it was ten-thirty.

Warren Feierstein is a former yeshiva boy who wears a skullcap and considers himself Orthodox, but he is undogmatic about identifying poor Jews. “We can usually tell by the name or by the accent—a lot of our clients are from Eastern Europe,” he said. “But basically, if someone claims to be Jewish, we take their word for it. It doesn’t really make much sense to go into people’s backgrounds. By the time they get here, they need help no matter who they are.”

Occasionally Feierstein does find out about a client’s background, but the information isn’t always helpful. “We had a woman here not long ago, the daughter of a prominent Chasidic rabbi in Brooklyn,” Warren told me. “She was a really pretty girl in her late teens. Her parents were extremely strict and she wanted to wear makeup, tight jeans, that sort of thing. So she ran away from home or her parents threw her out, I’m not sure which.
Anyway, she wound up on the streets, and she came to us for help. We got her a job as a margin clerk at the stock market and gave her a room here. Then, about six weeks later, she disappeared. I didn’t hear from her until I got a call from the police; she had been picked up on Times Square for hooking.”

“What did you do?” I asked. Warren shrugged. “There isn’t much you can do. I wish there was. We do what we can. It isn’t very much fun to be poor, but at least Jews have a place to turn. That’s something. And believe me, there are an awful lot of poor Jews in New York, young and old, religious and not religious, immigrants and native-born, black and white.…”

“Blacks? You mean like Chasidim?” In Israel, ultra-Orthodox Jews are sometimes called “blacks” because of their dark hats and coats.

“Them too. But I’m talking about black blacks. You’d be surprised how many black Jews there are in this city. They even have some congregations. I’m not sure where but I could try to find out if you’re interested,” he said.

I was, but Feierstein, despite his extensive network of contacts, proved unable to find a black synagogue. My curiosity was aroused, and I tried several other Jewish organizations, but none of them knew what I was talking about. Clearly, if there was a black congregation in New York it was very far out of the Jewish mainstream.

Unwilling to let go, I called
The New York Amsterdam News
in Harlem and spoke to the religion editor. In a Caribbean accent he told me he had heard of black Jewish congregations but didn’t know of any personally. “We have a Jewish woman on our switchboard,” he said. “Why don’t I ring you through and you can ask her.” I introduced myself to the operator and asked if she knew the whereabouts of a black synagogue. She was noncommittal but she took my number and said she’d see what she could do.

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!”