Capers Funnye

Origins and early life

Capers C. Funnye Jr. was born in Georgetown, South Carolina, into a Gullah-Geechee family of the Sea Islands, and grew up on the South Side of Chicago after his family joined the Great Migration; Michelle Obama is his first cousin once removed.

Work and career

Raised in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and urged at seventeen to enter the ministry, he grew dissatisfied with Christianity while at Howard University, looked into other faiths, and joined a Black Hebrew Israelite congregation in Chicago before studying for five years with Rabbi Levi Ben Levy, who ordained him in 1985. In that same year, wanting to build a bridge to the rest of American Judaism, he underwent a second, formal conversion certified by a Conservative rabbinical court, and he later took a degree in Jewish studies at the Spertus Institute.

He leads the Beth Shalom B'nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation of Chicago, one of the largest Black synagogues in the United States, is Chief Rabbi of the International Israelite Board of Rabbis, was the first African-American member of the Chicago Board of Rabbis, and in 1995 co-founded the National Conference of Black Jews. His own summary: I am a Jew, and that breaks through all colour and ethnic barriers.