Passover seder comes in variety of colors

NEW YORK — When Joshua Nelson sings the gospel music of his black ancestors, he commands attention.

It's not just because of his fire-and-brimstone voice, the comparisons with the late Mahalia Jackson, or even his discovery by Oprah Winfrey, whom he counts as a friend. It's the places he sometimes performs (synagogues), the word he avoids (Jesus), and his own faith (Jewish).

"We've been Jews for centuries, as long as anyone can remember," Nelson says. "Why is it that when people of color are Jews, questions are raised?"

In fact, Nelson is one of about 100,000 non-white Americans who were born Jewish. Another 300,000 people of color are followers of Judaism through marriage, adoption, conversion or the recent surge of Jewish immigrants from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, according to Yavilah McCoy, director of Ayecha, a New York-based group she founded five years ago to reach out to Jewish minorities.

Nelson's voice rocked a pre-Passover "Liberation Seder" last week that was organized by McCoy and co-hosted by The Jewish Community Center in Manhattan. The evening, accompanied by a seder meal of Middle Eastern, African and East European dishes, accented the Jewish community's diversity in New York.

Among black Jews, "you see the flavor of Jewish culture in a way you might not have seen before, when it was just black and white, so to speak — as in, Christians and non-Christians," says McCoy, 33, who is black and raised in Brooklyn's Crown Heights neighborhood, where she studied in a yeshiva with other Orthodox Jews.

At home now with her husband in St. Louis, a physician and Jewish convert, she plans to serve collard greens at the family Passover meal, replacing the pork with beef, fried like bacon.

The feast honors her Southern great-grandmother, who followed black traditions while embracing Judaism and renaming herself and her children after Old Testament figures.

The harmonious mix also raises the dilemma of black-Jewish relations today.

The civil-rights era made Jews and blacks close allies, but incidents like the Crown Heights riots of 1991 have put a heavy strain on the ties between the groups — a paradox to McCoy.

"Jews have been oppressed. And African-Americans have been oppressed," she says. "When a soul endures, there's something very beautiful in its music. It's not just oppression, but the spirit of joy that overcomes oppression — something so powerful that it's explosive."

At the "Liberation Seder," that spirit came in a variety of tones.