"There is no Shangri-La," Part II: The Original African Hebrew-Israelite Nation of Jerusalem
The year was 1969. The Vietnam war was still hot, and citizens were in the streets protesting against American involvement in Vietnam. The Nation of Islam, under Elijah Muhammad, was still cranking out viable Black institutions while simultaneously openly tagging all White people as “The Devil.” The Black Panther Party had opened up a branch on the west side of Chicago. For those in the know, guilt-ridden, liberal [very liberal] White Hippie women, in the area of Chicago called Old Town, were offering an interesting form of “Reparations” to Black men, every Friday night. (see my article entitled, Reparations—1960s style—and the Limits of Blackness.)
The great material success of the United States of America had worn a “hole in the soul” of millions of Americans, and people were escaping to “drop-out” movements and organizations that offered (or appeared to offer) something much deeper than the day-to-day, dog-eat-dog, soul-less grind in the rat race. There was The International Society of Krishna Consciousness, aka, Hare Krishna, founded by Abhay Charanaravinda Bhaktivedanta Swami, more popularly known as Swami Prabupada.
“Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo” was being chanted everywhere, even by people who were not members of the Buddhist reform movement, Nichiren Shoshu Soka Gakkai, and everyone was lining up, at Jones Commercial College, in Chicago, to receive their Gohonzon, at $15.00 a scroll, to place on their altar.
My big brother had become all but mesmerized by the Nichiren movement in America, and had knelt down on the floor of a stage, at Jones Commercial College, along with his girlfriend, and they both received the Gohonzons. I got one also, though I had no belief whatsoever in Nichiren, as I was an atheist at the time. I went home, placed my scroll in a drawer, and forgot about it. But my atheist days came to an end when I met a Cuban Babalawo named Salvadore Hernandez, and became a dedicated follower of the branch of the West African religion, Yoruba, that, in Cuba, was called Santeria.
I acquired my Elegua (Elegba) from Baba Hernandez, for which I performed a daily morning ritual: Rub yellow cocoa butter and Manteca de Coroho on it; suck up a mouthful of whiskey and spit the whiskey out on it; sling Florida water on it; place pennies in front of it, place fruit inside the flower pot that holds it, and light a candle in front of it.
Jesus People USA was founded in 1972. Decades later, my girlfriend’s sister, who had joined the group and married one of its leaders, left the group, along with her husband, tagging it a cult. She’s currently near completion of a book about the cult and will be looking for a publisher. A scathing documentary of JPUSA was produced by Jaime Prater, entitled, No Place to Call Home. See this video:
It was in the year 1969, during that same tumultuous, counter-culture, drop-out era, that a group of Black Americans entered the State of Israel. According to a Chicago Rabbi that I interviewed privately, when the group’s leader, Rabbi Ben Ammi Ben Israel, upon his arrival, was asked, “What do you want here,” he boldly answered, “Everything from the Nile to the Euphrates,” Biblical borders of ancient Israel that encompassed territory which, today, include an area that’s composed of modern-day Israel, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.
“Abba,” as Ben Ammi’s followers refer to him, had arrived to do what the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, hadn’t been able to do. Abba would take it all back—Chicago style. As you’ll see, there was no exaggeration whatsoever, on Abba’s part, from his perspective, of his self-declared mission.
“On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said, ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates — the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, and Jebusites.’” (Bible, Genesis 15:18-21)
Ben Carter, his birth name, had worked as a metallurgist at Chicago's Howard Foundry. He claimed that, one day, in 1966, the angel Gabriel had informed him that it was “time” for the “true” descendants of Israel, Black people, to “return” to “their” land. The Rabbi I spoke with informed me that Abba had actually been taught Hebrew by Rabbis in Chicago, on the north side.
In Black American history there had literally always been Black people who believed that they were descended from the Biblical Israelites. So, amongst some Black folks, there was a long tradition of embracing some form of Hebrew identity. Aside from that, there was the additional phenomena, in Black Christian Churches, of identification with the travails of the ancient Israelites, and their eventual delivery, by Moses, from the persecution of Pharoah. Black folks related to the travails of the ancient Hebrews, and likened those travails to the persecution Black folks had suffered in the United States.
This is not to say that Black Christians expected the appearance of some Messiah to deliver them from bondage. But, the stories, in the Bible, of deliverance were soothing stories for Black folks, in that those stories gave Black Christians hope that, in time, God would deliver Black folks from oppression.
Over the decades, dedicated Black Hebrew “camps” developed in America. In Chicago, there was B’nai Zakim Ba Shalom, whom my brother defined as “gangsta Hebrews,” whatever that meant. It was on the near west side. There were a couple of other camps on the west side, and a few camps on the south side, one headed by a man called Brother Daniel. Eventually, Abba formed his own camp.
My brother eventually left the Buddhist Nichiren Shoshu group and joined Ben Ammi’s Hebrew-Israelite camp. He even moved to Israel, and still lives there to this day. He and others told me that the core leadership of Abba’s group, The Original African Hebrew-Israelite Nation of Jerusalem, otherwise known as The African Hebrew Israelites, had formerly been members of the Nation of Islam, but left the Nation for various reasons. Cult-hopping was quite common back in that era, though Abba’s group had a remarkable run as a cult until things finally broke down in Israel, in part due to internal abuse, as explained by Mahaleyah. (See Part one: “There is no Shangri-La.”)
In the mid-1980s, after my second marriage ended, I started hanging out at Soul Vegetarian East, a vegetarian restaurant that was owned and managed by the Hebrews on the south side of Chicago. [I’ll use the term “Hebrews,” from now on, to refer only to Ben Ammi’s camp]. That experience exposed me to a very fascinating phenomena: the merging, over a couple of decades, amongst the Hebrews, of a number of elements, including “liberation” (otherwise known as white collar crime), religion, very powerful music, played by their band, The Sons of Light, a cool, upbeat style and aura of independence that shaped them into the hippest, most colorful, exciting, fun (and sometimes funny) Black group on the Chicago alternative set.
In addition, they’d spread out, with camps around the country, in the islands, like Jamaica, Trinidad, camps in West Africa, and were occupying three cities in Israel: Mitzpeh Ramon, Arad, and their headquarters in Dimona. They’d opened businesses in Israel and had entered, and won, some kind of annual, international entertainment contest held in Europe.
Now, I’ll have to explain something before moving on. At the time, I was an active member of The Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam, now called The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, a global Islamic organization founded in 1889 by Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. At annual Ahmadiyya conventions, a favorite thing to do was to tease new Ahmadi single men during the breakfast hours.
Someone would ask a new Ahmadi, “So, brother, do you have a telephone yet?” The brother would look a little puzzled, and say, “Well, of course.” The rest of us would smile. “Yeah, brother, you can’t know what’s really going on in the Jamaat [community] without a telephone.” Another brother would ask, “So, what’s her name?” The new Ahmadi would looked confused. He’d say, “Her? Well, brother, if you’re talking about a woman, I’m not married yet. I’m single.”
The brother that had asked him if he had a phone would say, “Brother, but when I asked you if you had a telephone, you said yes?” The brother would then look mighty puzzled, and everybody would burst out laughing. Then, someone would school him: “Brother, when we say ‘telephone,’ we’re talking about a woman; a wife. Going to Juma [Friday congregational prayer service]; attending meetings; going to conventions ain’t gonna get you up to speed on the real deal in the Jamaat. For that, you need a telephone—a wife.”
He was talking about gossip. Ahmadi men referred to Ahmadi women as telephones—the best source for finding out the real deal inside the Jamaat. So, anyone without a telephone was immensely deprived.
Anyway, when I started hanging out with the Hebrews, I got me a couple of telephones—Hebrew women who liked to talk. Plus, their “International Ambassador,” Nasi Asiel Ben Israel, now deceased, had been “secretly” trying to recruit me by throwing telephones in my face. I’d known what he was trying to do, because, fifteen years earlier, when I’d been in a Black nationalist organization, we used telephones to recruit members, such as a karate instructor we wanted as our instructor, and wanted badly. One of our telephones got his nose wide opened, and he joined our organization, thus gaining us a free karate instructor.
I had another telephone who was not a member of the Hebrews. She was one of the assistants of Minister Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam. She was more than a telephone. She became my woman—my girlfriend. And BOY did she like to transmit information!! Well, you know, as telephones do. She would be invited to the Hebrew sister’s meetings, and afterwards tell me all the inside knowledge that only a good telephone could tell you.
It came in handy. Because, unbeknownst to her, at the time, I’d had my eyes on a Hebrew sister who was in Israel. I’d seen a musical production the Hebrews had created, called, Gospel in the Holy Land. She appears in that production (Take a guess which one she is). I was head-over-heels for her, though I hadn’t met her. Also, at the time, my feelings about Ahmadiyyat were kind of wearing away, since my Ahmadi wife and I had broken up. Long, unpleasant story. I was anxious to have a telephone again, in my home, and I didn’t care if she was Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Hebrew or atheist.
Well, fortunately, and perhaps unfortunately, a couple of my telephones were shooting unpleasant information to me about things that were happening in Israel, within the community there, including criminal activity that they felt was Robin Hood cool. I, though, did not countenance criminal activity. Anyway, although it was very nice, believe me, to have a few telephones, it was a disappointment for me to hear the gossip about things that would come out, 24 years later, in my sister-in-law’s book, Israel’s Secret Cult. Some of it wasn’t too bad. But other things were immensely disheartening.
For instance, the famous Barbara Walters, of the then very popular TV magazine, 20/20, ran an episode of her magazine dedicated to the Hebrews. She interviewed a red-faced, White FBI agent, who said (and I’m paraphrasing), “We know that they have somehow funneled $10 million to a Swiss bank account. We know its theirs. But we just haven’t been able to prove it.”
Nasi Asiel, at the next Sunday meeting, openly bragged about it, in a sly manner. He entered the room and the Hebrews assembled started chanting some Hebrew-language greeting loudly, over and over again. He reached the podium, and stood there with that big, winning smile of his. Then he said,
"Ya'll see 20-20 Thursday?" Everybody cracked up. Then, Nasi, feigning befuddlement, just to be funny, frowned up and asked Horaymiel, "Horaymiel, you know anything about $10 million in a Swiss bank account?" Horaymiel answered, he too feigning befuddlement, rubbing his chin and fake-frowning, "Naw, Nasi. I don't know noth'n about no $10 million in no Swiss bank account. Besides, don’t no BLACK man know noth'n about opening up a Swiss bank account all the way over in Switzerland." Everybody roared with laughter.
Once, I was sitting in Soul eating. A Hebrew man was sitting next to me. When two Hebrew women walked in the front door, he leaned over to me and said, “Those are the two sisters that work at [He named a Chicago bank] and are experts in computers. They’re the ones liberating that dough and sending it to Switzerland,” He said. I don’t do crime, and never did. I stole one thing—a toy—from a dime store when I was a kid. I took it home, played with it, and felt so guilty that I snuck it back to the store. But, I was royally pissed off that that Hebrew was running his mouth off—just like a telephone—spilling the beans. This is human weakness: People want to feel special.
Once, a family member and I were visiting my mom. He had become a member of the Hebrews. At one point, he said, “C’mon with me to the bowling alley. I want to make a call.” I couldn’t understand why he didn’t simply make the call there at my mom’s. Anyway, I went with him to the bowling alley. He dialed the phone, and then started rattling off numbers. He talked to someone in Israel for a while, and hung up.
I asked him, “What were those numbers?” I’d not known about credit card calls. He said, “You go to an airport and stand near a bank of phones. Eventually, some White dude uses the phone, and rattling off numbers. You write the numbers down. That’s it.” I blasted him. He started using an expression used by Malcolm X, telling me that “You know what Malcolm said!! Any means necessary!!” That was one of the top mantras back in the 1960s and 1970s. You get your liberation “by any means necessary.” I told him he was just a thief, and that that White guy might have been someone that helps Black folks in some manner. He just got quiet and pouted as we went back to my mom’s.
I kept thinking about that woman I’d wanted. But I was getting disappointed in learning about the criminal enterprise aspect of the Hebrews. One day, my brother, who, recall, had joined the Hebrews, and I left Soul to go visit our dad. Now, if you’ve had a sibling whom you grew up with, he cannot hide a single thing from you. One slight expression on his face is one that you’ll know means something that no one else on earth knows.
Since my telephones had pulled my coat about the criminal, and other unsavory parts of Hebrew culture, I wanted straight answers from my big brother. We got in the van. He was driving. After a few minutes, I asked him, straight up, “Brother-brother, tell me what you guys are really about.” He answers, “What? Why you asking me that? We’re about the God of our fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. We’re about righteousness. We’re about living a holistic life. We’re about worshipping Yah.”
I sighed, pissed off. I got quiet again. After a while, I asked again: “Yeshiah….What’s the real deal with you guys. What’s your real program?” Visibly peeved, he goes, “I told you. It’s about the God of our fathers. It’s about returning to the Holy Land, because Abba has called the saints home.” Bullshit.
I knew about the white collar crime. I knew about their counterfeiter, B. Kayil, who virtually bragged, in hints, that he was “making money for Abba.” My uncle Geno had been a counterfeiter. I knew about some of the unsavory things that would be revealed in Mahaleyah’s book, 24 years later. And I knew my brother. His face spelled lie.
I waited again. Then, finally, again I asked him what the real deal was. He let go of the steering wheel with his right hand, jerked his arm forward and grabbed the air, as if he had snatched some physical object, and said, “This ain’t about no goddamned RELIGION, Abu!! This is about land, language, and culture. We have a demographic plan to TAKE Israel!!!”
I was in the martial arts community at the time. Every year, somewhere on this earth, there is a month long, secret event that takes place. About 30 martial artists gather to conduct kumites—sparring matches. But these are special sparring matches. They’re not matches where you punch close to the opponent’s body to obtain your “ippon,” i.e., your score. These are fight to the death sparring matches. Seriously.
Those in the know, in the arts, are always anxious to learn who had won the annual fight-to-the-death match. One particular year, it was held in the Philippines. Generally, I think between 15 to 30 men appear for the matches. Two guys got in the ring and fought. One—the one who was still alive at the end—was declared the winner. The dead one lost.
At some later time, he fought another man—and won. At the end of that year’s bouts, that man had beat some 15 to 30 men—to death, and was crowned the fight-to-the-death winner for that year. Well, that same man came back the next year—and won. Then he came back the next year after that—and won. That man won the international fight-to-the death matches three years in a row. Who was he? He was an Ashkenazeem, White Jew from Israel.
When my brother told me that “The Kingdom,” as the Hebrews had nicknamed their group, was going to “take” Israel, I didn’t know whether to laugh or tell him he was a stupid, insane motherf*cker. They were gonna “take” Israel from the baddest cats in the Middle East. GOOD F*CKING LUCK!!!!
Anyway, he explained that they believed in “Divine Marriage” (polygamy), and that their camps around the world practiced Divine Marriage, and, eventually, would all come to Israel and “baby up,” eventually surpassing the Ashkenazeem “White” Jews in population. They really believed this. He told me that the upper echelon of the group stood around maps, conducting what, in essence, were war games as they planned their “capture” of the State of Israel.
In other words, their real identity, fundamentally, was that of 100% Black nationalists, not religious people, who employed the any means necessary philosophy to attempt to attain what I consider to have been an absolutely insane goal. Unfortunately, like any serious cult, the membership is drawn in, and controlled, by the typical tactics that cults use. My brother and one of his wives, Mahaleyah, eventually left the cult, as you learned if you read my article, “There is no Shangri-La,” and created that two-part video you saw in that article in which, using Marcia Rudin's 14 Common Characteristics of a Cult, they proved that The Original African Hebrew-Israelite Nation of Jerusalem was a cult with, as I see it, whacked out goals.
Though they might not wish to admit this, they were also an outgrowth of the 1960s counter-culture “revolution” that was going on all over the United States: people who were dropping out of society; forming communes, for example, especially the Hippies. One of their stated goals was to get out of “Babylon,” their nickname for the United States, to take their children to a better environment.
They must be given credit for having created schools, in Israel, for their children, some businesses, etc. But, unfortunately, it all came crashing down on their heads, and from within, with Abba, according to my other sister-in-law, Ariellah, eventually declaring himself to be God. (My brother engaged in “Divine Marriage,” and had three wives. Two have passed on, and he’s still married to the one he’s been with since 1970).
I have much more I can talk about. The reason I wrote this article is because I have become disturbed, lately, at cult-like groups, such as Black Lives Matter, that young Black people are attracted to. That group caused a lot of damage in the United States, including a few police officers that were killed due to BLM-influenced rioting.
I’m tired of seeing my people lured into cults by slick demons who, using “Blackness” or “Black consciousness” or declaring themselves “The Chosen People of God,” and other guises to lure people, often end up creating harm and misery to members. There’s been enough of that, and our people need no more of it. One motivator for joining such groups, especially, it seems, in the case of Black folks, is the need to possess a unique identity. And what could be more attractive than a new recruit being told that he or she is a direct descendant of one of the ancient Hebrews, and, thus, belongs to that special class of people called “The Chosen People of God.”
Ben Ammi had once declared that he would live forever. It was no surprise that, when he died, an Israeli newspaper featured the following headline: “Ben Ammi, spiritual leader of the African Hebrew-Israelites, and who had claimed that he would live forever, died today…” And, OH YES, I tried to find that headline for this article, but I failed. May Ben Ammi Ben Israel, Abba Gadol [Great Father], as his followers called him, rest in peace. Despite the immense pain and suffering he caused my sister-in-law, Mahaleya, and many, many others of the cult, I hope that he’s finally found his Shangri-La.