Black Rabbi Chants Kaddish To Mourn Chicagoans Killed By Police
During a community meeting on police accountability in Chicago, a prominent African-American rabbi read the names of individuals killed by the police and chanted the traditional mourners kaddish in Hebrew.
Rabbi Funnye, @JCUA_News Pres, reads names of Chgoans killed by police, chants mourner’s kaddish. #ReformCPD pic.twitter.com/FR4HtRJ16i
— Aryeh Bernstein (@aryehlou) April 2, 2017
Rabbi Capers C. Funnye, spiritual leader of Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation in Chicago, was speaking at a community event hosted by the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs, where he is also president. More than 200 gathered on Sunday at KAM Isaiah Israel, Chicago’s oldest synagouge, to address police reform and violence in Chicago, according to social media reports.
A member of Funnye’s largely black congregation named Cydney Wallace also took the stage and said she lived in “constant tension” because of police.
Funnye was ordained at the Israelite Academy, a rabbinical school for Hebrew Israelites and is now chief rabbi of the International Israelite Board of Rabbis. Funnye is also cousin to former First Lady Michelle Obama.
Email Sam Kestenbaum at kestenbaum@forward.com
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO