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Two NYTimes articles
Black Rabbi Reaches Out to Mainstream of His Faith
Black Rabbi Reaches Out to Mainstream of His Faith
By NIKO KOPPEL
CHICAGO — Having grown up in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Capers C. Funnye Jr. was encouraged by his pastor to follow in his footsteps. Instead, he became a rabbi.
His congregation on the Far Southwest Side of Chicago is predominantly black, and while services include prayers and biblical passages in Hebrew, the worshipers sometimes break into song, swaying back and forth like a gospel choir.
As the first African-American member of the Chicago Board of Rabbis and of numerous mainstream Jewish organizations, Rabbi Funnye (pronounced fun-AY) is on a mission to bridge racial and religious divisions by encouraging Chicago’s wider Jewish community to embrace his followers — the more than 200 members of Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation.
“I am a Jew,” said Rabbi Funnye, “and that breaks through all color and ethnic barriers.”
As a teenager, Rabbi Funnye said he felt disconnected and dissatisfied with his Methodist faith. He embarked on a spiritual journey, investigating other religions, including Islam, before turning to Judaism. He said he found a sense of intellectual and spiritual liberation in Judaism because it encourages constant examination. “The Jew has always questioned,” he said.
Like their rabbi, a majority of Beth Shalom’s members came to Judaism later in life, after wrestling with contradictions and questions that they found in their own earlier beliefs. Many refer to their religious experience as reversion, rather than conversion, and feel a cultural connection to the lost tribes of Israel. They say that Judaism has renewed their sense of personal identity.
There are no firm national statistics on the number of African-American Jews, said Gary Tobin, president of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research. Usually referred to as Israelites or Hebrews, they have historically been seen to stand apart in theology and observance from the nation’s approximately 5.3 million Jews, mainly of Ashkenazi, or European, ancestry, and have largely been ignored by the broader Jewish community. Rabbi Funnye hopes to change that by speaking about his congregation at synagogues throughout Chicago and across the country.
“I believe that people cannot know you unless you make yourself known,” he said. “The only way to do that is to step outside and not fear rejection.”
To spread his message, he also serves on the boards of the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs and the American Jewish Congress of the Midwest. In addition, he is active in the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, focusing on reaching out to other communities of black Jews around the world, including the Falashas in Ethiopia and the Igbo in Nigeria.
Occupying a former Ashkenazi synagogue, Beth Shalom is in the Marquette Park neighborhood. It is just blocks from where Chicago’s Nazi party used to march and where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was struck by a rock while protesting against segregated housing in 1966.
The congregation was founded in 1918 as the Ethiopian Hebrew Settlement Workers Association by Rabbi Horace Hasan from Bombay. Members include some Hispanics, African-Americans and whites who were born Jews, as well as former Christians and Muslims. In line with traditional Jewish law, Beth Shalom does not seek out converts, and members must study for a year before undergoing a traditional conversion ritual. Men are required to be circumcised, and women undergo a ritual bath in a mikvah.
Many worshipers feel that their devotion to Judaism is misunderstood.
“When the broader community thinks of a Jew,” Dinah Levi said, “we don’t fit the profile.” Ms. Levi, 57, raised as a Baptist, is vice president of Beth Shalom, where she said she feels at home with spiritual elements that incorporate the African-American experience. “Since we are a varied people as written in the Torah,” she said, “I think the religion can be embraced by a multitude of people.”
Beth Shalom’s service is somewhere between Conservative and Modern Orthodox observance with distinctive African-American influences. Men and women sit separately as the liturgy is read in English and Hebrew. Some members kiss their prayer shawls, pointing to the Torah, as is the practice in traditional synagogues. A chorus sings spirituals over the beat of a drum.
Across America, black congregations have been active since the early 20th century. In the past, efforts to reach out to the mainstream Jewish community have been met with suspicion and rejection, said Lewis R. Gordon, the director of the Center of Afro-Jewish Studies at Temple University. That is why many groups stay separatist, aligning themselves more with black nationalism than with traditional Jewish groups.
“People ask me, ‘As if you aren’t already in a bad enough situation being black, why would you want to be Jewish?’ ” said Tamar Manasseh, 29, a lifelong member of Beth Shalom.
Ms. Manasseh, wearing a Star of David around her neck, attended Jewish day school and is currently planning her daughter’s bat mitzvah. “I can’t change being Jewish just the same way I can’t change being black,” she said. Close to completing her rabbinic studies, she will be among the first black women to be ordained as a rabbi, according to Rabbi Funnye, her mentor.
After a Saturday service, Rabbi Funnye has a quiet moment in his office. On the wall is a 1930s black-and-white photograph of members of an African-American congregation. The men, all in prayer shawls, look out before an opened Torah. “We’re not going anywhere,” said Rabbi Funnye, smiling confidently, “I’m going to reach out until you reach back.”
Growing Cheers for the Home-Schooled Team
Growing Cheers for the Home-Schooled Team
By JOE DRAPE
OKLAHOMA CITY — Taber Spani, one of the best high school girls basketball players in the nation, holds hands with two opponents as a coach reads a Bible verse. It is the way each game in the National Christian Homeschool Basketball Championships begins.
This is more than a postseason tournament for the 300 boys and girls teams from 19 states that have competed here over the past six days. As the stands packed with parents and the baselines overrun by small children attest, this is also a jamboree to celebrate faith and family.
“You build friendships here with other girls who know what it’s like to be self-motivated and disciplined and share your values,” said Spani, a junior who plays for the Metro Academy Mavericks of Olathe, Kan. “I wouldn’t trade this tournament for anything.”
Only a decade ago, home-school athletics was considered little more than organized recess for children without traditional classrooms. Now, home-school players are tracked by scouts, and dozens of them have accepted scholarships to colleges as small as Blue Mountain in Mississippi and as well known as Iowa State.
When the field for the N.C.A.A. women’s basketball tournament is selected Monday, there will be plenty more evidence that standout players can be plucked from a prayer circle as well as from a playground. Rachel McLeod of Liberty University, Corrie Hester of Oral Roberts and Shalin Spani of Kansas State, Taber’s older sister, all played in the national home-school tournament.
Taber Spani, however, is the movement’s most celebrated player. Two coaching giants in women’s college basketball, Connecticut’s Geno Auriemma and Tennessee’s Pat Summitt, who between them have won 12 national titles, are pursuing her.
An estimated two million children are schooled at home, and only 18 states have laws that grant them access to athletic teams at public schools. So it was perhaps inevitable that home-school programs and tournaments developed.
“As the home-school movement has gotten older, there has been much more demand for extracurricular activities,” said Ian M. Slatter, a spokesman for the Home School Legal Defense Association. “Parents had already crossed the hurdle of educating children at home, so now they have turned their energy and resources to athletics.”
Many of the best teams here were founded by some of the home-school athletic movement’s pioneers. In 1992, Tom Sanders bought some reversible jerseys and founded the Homeschool Christian Youth Association Warriors in Houston so his 14-year-old son could play organized basketball with his friends. He had to plead with small Christian schools, even reform schools, to schedule 14 games that season.
By 1998, Sanders’s program had sent Kevin Johnson, a 6-foot-8 center, to the University of Tulsa on a scholarship. Before this tournament, the Warriors had a 33-3 record against some of the best high school teams in Texas. Sanders’s son Jesse will play for Rice next season. The Warriors were represented by 12 teams and more than 100 players last week.
Likewise, Tim Flatt has built the Oklahoma City Storm into a feared opponent among the state’s high schools the past 10 years. His program has 125 boys and girls, ages 8 to 18, on 11 teams. As with most home-school groups, it was built on word of mouth and financed out of parents’ pockets and the occasional bake sale.
“We went from not being very good to not being scheduled again after we beat some big schools,” said Flatt, whose varsity boys team was 20-6 this season. “The culture has changed, and there is less of a stigma if you lose to a home-school team. It’s not a slap in the face now when we beat a high school team. They know we make them better for their state playoffs.”
In 2001, Flatt, a retired sports memorabilia dealer, took the National Christian Homeschool Basketball Championships here. He wanted to create not only a basketball showcase, but also a destination for families. He understood that fielding a home-school team remained an independent and often taxing endeavor. Rounding up opponents is a grind, as is raising as much as $20,000 annually for uniforms, renting gyms and traveling to tournaments.
“A lot of home-school teams play in small gyms, church gyms, and they play against weaker competition,” Flatt said. “They don’t get to experience something at a national scale. I wanted to make the kids feel like they were getting big-time treatment, and their parents want to take a week of vacation to come here.”
Flatt’s vision was on full display Wednesday at the 5,000-seat Sawyer Center at Southern Nazarene University. It was standing room only as parents and children shared pizza and watched the National Christian Homeschool all-American boys and girls teams compete in all-star games, as well as 3-point and dunk contests.
“There’s an aura about home-schoolers that we’re nerds with Coke-bottle glasses,” said Adam Krejci, who plays at nearby Oklahoma Christian University and helps with the tournament. “When you start talking about players like Taber, and you watch some of the teams and players coming through here, it is hard to laugh at us.”
There was little doubt that Wednesday night belonged to Spani, a 6-1 left-handed guard. She drained 3-pointers, used nifty moves to score driving baskets, and hit teammates with precise no-look passes. It was difficult to tell who was more appreciative — the fans who cheered her or her parents, Gary and Stacey.
The Spanis knew they wanted to home-school their five daughters but were more aware than most how important sports might become to them. Gary is a former all-American linebacker at Kansas State who played nine seasons for the Kansas City Chiefs in the National Football League.; Stacey is the daughter of Frosty Westering, who won four national titles as the football coach at Pacific Lutheran University.
“Our Christian faith is No. 1 why we did it,” Gary Spani said of why he and Stacey chose to home-school their children. “We’re team oriented, and we wanted to make sure our family was supporting one another. We also agreed that when our daughters reached eighth grade, we’d let them decide if they wanted to go to high school.”
So far Shalin, Taber and Tanis, a sophomore, have decided to stay home and play for Stacey, who coached the Mavericks to a 30-5 record against high schools in Kansas and Missouri this season. Chances are good that Sajel, in seventh grade, and Taris, in fourth grade, will also decide to keep their mother as their teacher and coach. It means that the Spanis will leave at 5:20 a.m. for the long drive to practice each day for eight more seasons.
“It’s a family thing — I wanted the opportunity to be with my sisters constantly,” Taber Spani said of continuing to be home-schooled. “It really was an easy decision. I never felt like I was going to be missed by colleges.”
She has, indeed, gotten looks from college recruiters, and more than 100 Division I teams have contacted her. Still, Spani says she is in no hurry to decide between Connecticut or Tennessee. She may even join her sister Shalin at Kansas State, their parents’ alma mater.
“No matter where I go, I’ll be ready,” she said. “No matter where I go, I’ll also miss this tournament. It really has been the highlight of my high school experience.”
Black Rabbi Reaches Out to Mainstream of His Faith
By NIKO KOPPEL
CHICAGO — Having grown up in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Capers C. Funnye Jr. was encouraged by his pastor to follow in his footsteps. Instead, he became a rabbi.
His congregation on the Far Southwest Side of Chicago is predominantly black, and while services include prayers and biblical passages in Hebrew, the worshipers sometimes break into song, swaying back and forth like a gospel choir.
As the first African-American member of the Chicago Board of Rabbis and of numerous mainstream Jewish organizations, Rabbi Funnye (pronounced fun-AY) is on a mission to bridge racial and religious divisions by encouraging Chicago’s wider Jewish community to embrace his followers — the more than 200 members of Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation.
“I am a Jew,” said Rabbi Funnye, “and that breaks through all color and ethnic barriers.”
As a teenager, Rabbi Funnye said he felt disconnected and dissatisfied with his Methodist faith. He embarked on a spiritual journey, investigating other religions, including Islam, before turning to Judaism. He said he found a sense of intellectual and spiritual liberation in Judaism because it encourages constant examination. “The Jew has always questioned,” he said.
Like their rabbi, a majority of Beth Shalom’s members came to Judaism later in life, after wrestling with contradictions and questions that they found in their own earlier beliefs. Many refer to their religious experience as reversion, rather than conversion, and feel a cultural connection to the lost tribes of Israel. They say that Judaism has renewed their sense of personal identity.
There are no firm national statistics on the number of African-American Jews, said Gary Tobin, president of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research. Usually referred to as Israelites or Hebrews, they have historically been seen to stand apart in theology and observance from the nation’s approximately 5.3 million Jews, mainly of Ashkenazi, or European, ancestry, and have largely been ignored by the broader Jewish community. Rabbi Funnye hopes to change that by speaking about his congregation at synagogues throughout Chicago and across the country.
“I believe that people cannot know you unless you make yourself known,” he said. “The only way to do that is to step outside and not fear rejection.”
To spread his message, he also serves on the boards of the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs and the American Jewish Congress of the Midwest. In addition, he is active in the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, focusing on reaching out to other communities of black Jews around the world, including the Falashas in Ethiopia and the Igbo in Nigeria.
Occupying a former Ashkenazi synagogue, Beth Shalom is in the Marquette Park neighborhood. It is just blocks from where Chicago’s Nazi party used to march and where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was struck by a rock while protesting against segregated housing in 1966.
The congregation was founded in 1918 as the Ethiopian Hebrew Settlement Workers Association by Rabbi Horace Hasan from Bombay. Members include some Hispanics, African-Americans and whites who were born Jews, as well as former Christians and Muslims. In line with traditional Jewish law, Beth Shalom does not seek out converts, and members must study for a year before undergoing a traditional conversion ritual. Men are required to be circumcised, and women undergo a ritual bath in a mikvah.
Many worshipers feel that their devotion to Judaism is misunderstood.
“When the broader community thinks of a Jew,” Dinah Levi said, “we don’t fit the profile.” Ms. Levi, 57, raised as a Baptist, is vice president of Beth Shalom, where she said she feels at home with spiritual elements that incorporate the African-American experience. “Since we are a varied people as written in the Torah,” she said, “I think the religion can be embraced by a multitude of people.”
Beth Shalom’s service is somewhere between Conservative and Modern Orthodox observance with distinctive African-American influences. Men and women sit separately as the liturgy is read in English and Hebrew. Some members kiss their prayer shawls, pointing to the Torah, as is the practice in traditional synagogues. A chorus sings spirituals over the beat of a drum.
Across America, black congregations have been active since the early 20th century. In the past, efforts to reach out to the mainstream Jewish community have been met with suspicion and rejection, said Lewis R. Gordon, the director of the Center of Afro-Jewish Studies at Temple University. That is why many groups stay separatist, aligning themselves more with black nationalism than with traditional Jewish groups.
“People ask me, ‘As if you aren’t already in a bad enough situation being black, why would you want to be Jewish?’ ” said Tamar Manasseh, 29, a lifelong member of Beth Shalom.
Ms. Manasseh, wearing a Star of David around her neck, attended Jewish day school and is currently planning her daughter’s bat mitzvah. “I can’t change being Jewish just the same way I can’t change being black,” she said. Close to completing her rabbinic studies, she will be among the first black women to be ordained as a rabbi, according to Rabbi Funnye, her mentor.
After a Saturday service, Rabbi Funnye has a quiet moment in his office. On the wall is a 1930s black-and-white photograph of members of an African-American congregation. The men, all in prayer shawls, look out before an opened Torah. “We’re not going anywhere,” said Rabbi Funnye, smiling confidently, “I’m going to reach out until you reach back.”
Growing Cheers for the Home-Schooled Team
Growing Cheers for the Home-Schooled Team
By JOE DRAPE
OKLAHOMA CITY — Taber Spani, one of the best high school girls basketball players in the nation, holds hands with two opponents as a coach reads a Bible verse. It is the way each game in the National Christian Homeschool Basketball Championships begins.
This is more than a postseason tournament for the 300 boys and girls teams from 19 states that have competed here over the past six days. As the stands packed with parents and the baselines overrun by small children attest, this is also a jamboree to celebrate faith and family.
“You build friendships here with other girls who know what it’s like to be self-motivated and disciplined and share your values,” said Spani, a junior who plays for the Metro Academy Mavericks of Olathe, Kan. “I wouldn’t trade this tournament for anything.”
Only a decade ago, home-school athletics was considered little more than organized recess for children without traditional classrooms. Now, home-school players are tracked by scouts, and dozens of them have accepted scholarships to colleges as small as Blue Mountain in Mississippi and as well known as Iowa State.
When the field for the N.C.A.A. women’s basketball tournament is selected Monday, there will be plenty more evidence that standout players can be plucked from a prayer circle as well as from a playground. Rachel McLeod of Liberty University, Corrie Hester of Oral Roberts and Shalin Spani of Kansas State, Taber’s older sister, all played in the national home-school tournament.
Taber Spani, however, is the movement’s most celebrated player. Two coaching giants in women’s college basketball, Connecticut’s Geno Auriemma and Tennessee’s Pat Summitt, who between them have won 12 national titles, are pursuing her.
An estimated two million children are schooled at home, and only 18 states have laws that grant them access to athletic teams at public schools. So it was perhaps inevitable that home-school programs and tournaments developed.
“As the home-school movement has gotten older, there has been much more demand for extracurricular activities,” said Ian M. Slatter, a spokesman for the Home School Legal Defense Association. “Parents had already crossed the hurdle of educating children at home, so now they have turned their energy and resources to athletics.”
Many of the best teams here were founded by some of the home-school athletic movement’s pioneers. In 1992, Tom Sanders bought some reversible jerseys and founded the Homeschool Christian Youth Association Warriors in Houston so his 14-year-old son could play organized basketball with his friends. He had to plead with small Christian schools, even reform schools, to schedule 14 games that season.
By 1998, Sanders’s program had sent Kevin Johnson, a 6-foot-8 center, to the University of Tulsa on a scholarship. Before this tournament, the Warriors had a 33-3 record against some of the best high school teams in Texas. Sanders’s son Jesse will play for Rice next season. The Warriors were represented by 12 teams and more than 100 players last week.
Likewise, Tim Flatt has built the Oklahoma City Storm into a feared opponent among the state’s high schools the past 10 years. His program has 125 boys and girls, ages 8 to 18, on 11 teams. As with most home-school groups, it was built on word of mouth and financed out of parents’ pockets and the occasional bake sale.
“We went from not being very good to not being scheduled again after we beat some big schools,” said Flatt, whose varsity boys team was 20-6 this season. “The culture has changed, and there is less of a stigma if you lose to a home-school team. It’s not a slap in the face now when we beat a high school team. They know we make them better for their state playoffs.”
In 2001, Flatt, a retired sports memorabilia dealer, took the National Christian Homeschool Basketball Championships here. He wanted to create not only a basketball showcase, but also a destination for families. He understood that fielding a home-school team remained an independent and often taxing endeavor. Rounding up opponents is a grind, as is raising as much as $20,000 annually for uniforms, renting gyms and traveling to tournaments.
“A lot of home-school teams play in small gyms, church gyms, and they play against weaker competition,” Flatt said. “They don’t get to experience something at a national scale. I wanted to make the kids feel like they were getting big-time treatment, and their parents want to take a week of vacation to come here.”
Flatt’s vision was on full display Wednesday at the 5,000-seat Sawyer Center at Southern Nazarene University. It was standing room only as parents and children shared pizza and watched the National Christian Homeschool all-American boys and girls teams compete in all-star games, as well as 3-point and dunk contests.
“There’s an aura about home-schoolers that we’re nerds with Coke-bottle glasses,” said Adam Krejci, who plays at nearby Oklahoma Christian University and helps with the tournament. “When you start talking about players like Taber, and you watch some of the teams and players coming through here, it is hard to laugh at us.”
There was little doubt that Wednesday night belonged to Spani, a 6-1 left-handed guard. She drained 3-pointers, used nifty moves to score driving baskets, and hit teammates with precise no-look passes. It was difficult to tell who was more appreciative — the fans who cheered her or her parents, Gary and Stacey.
The Spanis knew they wanted to home-school their five daughters but were more aware than most how important sports might become to them. Gary is a former all-American linebacker at Kansas State who played nine seasons for the Kansas City Chiefs in the National Football League.; Stacey is the daughter of Frosty Westering, who won four national titles as the football coach at Pacific Lutheran University.
“Our Christian faith is No. 1 why we did it,” Gary Spani said of why he and Stacey chose to home-school their children. “We’re team oriented, and we wanted to make sure our family was supporting one another. We also agreed that when our daughters reached eighth grade, we’d let them decide if they wanted to go to high school.”
So far Shalin, Taber and Tanis, a sophomore, have decided to stay home and play for Stacey, who coached the Mavericks to a 30-5 record against high schools in Kansas and Missouri this season. Chances are good that Sajel, in seventh grade, and Taris, in fourth grade, will also decide to keep their mother as their teacher and coach. It means that the Spanis will leave at 5:20 a.m. for the long drive to practice each day for eight more seasons.
“It’s a family thing — I wanted the opportunity to be with my sisters constantly,” Taber Spani said of continuing to be home-schooled. “It really was an easy decision. I never felt like I was going to be missed by colleges.”
She has, indeed, gotten looks from college recruiters, and more than 100 Division I teams have contacted her. Still, Spani says she is in no hurry to decide between Connecticut or Tennessee. She may even join her sister Shalin at Kansas State, their parents’ alma mater.
“No matter where I go, I’ll be ready,” she said. “No matter where I go, I’ll also miss this tournament. It really has been the highlight of my high school experience.”