African-American woman studying to be rabbi
MARQUETTE PARK | 'People still kind of look at me funny'
Tamar Manasseh is a triple minority -- black, Jewish and studying to become a rabbi.
"As if African-American women don't have enough challenges already, why would you want to go ahead and do something like this?" she says, asking the question that others have posed. "You don't make the decision to do it. It kind of comes to you."
(Scott Stewart/Sun-Times)
The Chicago-born mother of two has four years to go in the five-year rabbinic master's program at the African-American-founded Israelite Academy. Its previous incarnation, the New York-based Ethiopian Hebrew Rabbinical College, dates to 1925.
Raised by her mother in the Jewish faith since youth, Manasseh, 30, is a lifelong member of Beth Shalom B'Nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation.
The congregation, which is largely black, was founded in 1915 and moved to its current location -- the former Lawn Manor Hebrew Congregation on South Kedzie in Marquette Park -- in 2004, from the Southeast Side.
Its chief rabbi, Capers C. Funnye Jr., heads the Israelite Academy's Chicago arm and is Manasseh's primary instructor.
"She has the stamina, the stomach, the desire, the capacity, the intelligence and the compassion to make it," he says.
But she faces challenges, Funnye says. Among them: critics in the black Jewish community. Funnye says many of his colleagues are against women being ordained.
"The Reform [Jewish] community and the Reconstructionist community and the Conservative community have women rabbis," he says. "The Orthodox community doesn't. So I would imagine that if she proves herself to be qualified and as she moves in to the broader Jewish community, that based upon her level of skill and her capacity and her abilities, she will be accepted."
Manasseh and her family say she has been dealing with naysayers her whole life.
"She did face some challenges," says her mother, Everloyce McCullough, who "reverted" from Catholicism to Judaism before Manasseh was born. "I don't think that she ever said, 'I don't want to do this.' But it was difficult for her, and we talked through it, and she managed to do some introspection. And she realized that this is who she is, and this is where she belongs."
Still, especially as a teenager, it was hard to blend in as a black Jew.
"At some point, every kid feels like they're a freak," Manasseh says, "but it makes so much sense to me now.
"I couldn't wear my star of David because it was too gang-related," she says, noting that the religious symbol was also the sign of the Gangster Disciples gang. "I've never understood that. Sometimes, people will still kind of look at me funny."
They would make comments about her clothes and her second language -- Hebrew. Occasionally, their slights led to fights.
"I was embarrassed, and I didn't want to do it, but I fought to defend who I was," Manasseh says. "I had to. Sometimes, that does make you resent other people when you grow up doing that. So I had to break down those walls when I got older, and I had to realize we were kids, and that's what kids do."
Her own offspring don't get nearly as much razzing, she says. Hardly any at all. "It's a different generation of kids," she says.
On Saturday, acting in the capacity of gabbi (assistant to the rabbi), Manasseh will help preside over her daughter's bat mitzvah, Judaism's coming-of-age ceremony.
Afraid the two of them would drive each other "crazy," mom left most of the pre-ceremony tutoring to Rabbi Funnye.
"I'm too closely related," she says.
"I had to find this God for myself. And that's possibly one of the best things that could have happened to me in my entire life. I can't convey to my children how important it is if I don't know how important it is."
