On a recent summer morning in the Bronx, an infant, swaddled in woven white cotton, was about to receive her Hebrew name: Emunah. Wearing a flowing patterned robe, his dreadlocks pulled back with a shawl draped over his head and shoulders, her grandfather Moreh Mordekai Gordon spoke in a Jamaican accent to those assembled at the small Mount Horeb congregation, perched on a hill not far from the elevated train. “We must be an example to the rest of the world,” said Gordon, spreading his arms wide. “We are preserving the old traditions and are each links in a great chain.”
Rabbi Yehuda Moshe Benlewi, shorter than Gordon and wrapped in a shawl, nodded his head in agreement. “What we are doing here is Jewish and African,” Benlewi said later in the service. “Judaism is an African religion.”
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