How is this pastor healing the rift between Black, Jewish communities?

Pastor Dumisani Washington, founder and CEO of the Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel (IBSI), is carrying the torch lit by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. to illuminate these dark times of strife between the Black and Jewish communities. 

Born in 1967 in segregated Little Rock, Arkansas, and raised in San Francisco and Stockton, California, in a Christian spiritually Zionist home, he heard sermons from the Old Testament and listened to gospel songs about Jerusalem at his church.

He tells the Magazine, “This was always part of what was a stereotypically Black church.... There are lots of songs of Zion, songs of Jerusalem, spiritual [stories] that go back for centuries that talk about Moses and the children of Israel and Egypt... that’s very standard for most Black church attendees.” 

Washington vividly recalls being a senior in high school when he saw a news report about Operation Moses, the rescue mission that saved approximately 8,000 Ethiopian Jews who had escaped civil war and famine and were languishing in refugee camps in Sudan by bringing them to Israel. 

“It captured me,” he says. “I wanted to know more later on about the Jewish roots of my faith. These things were all part of my journey... it made me more curious about Israel and wanting to know about Jewish people.” He could not imagine then how much this experience would influence his life.

Doing outreach to help bring Jews, Black Christians together

FROM 2014 to 2021, Washington served as the diversity outreach coordinator for Christians United for Israel, where he engaged support for Israel and the Jewish people from its over 10 million Christian Zionist members. He is the author of Zionism and the Black Church: Why Standing with Israel Will Be a Defining Issue for Christians of Color in the 21st Century. He also created The Mizrahi Project, a film that tells the story of over 850,000 Jewish refugees from North Africa and the Middle East. 

In 2013, Washington founded IBSI, whose P.E.A.C.E. (Plan for Education, Advocacy and Community Engagement) initiative teaches 16 courses about the history of Israel and Jewish-Black relations to young Black Americans. IBSI works in partnership with the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, which helped to facilitate the institute’s trip to South Africa in December.

Washington took 20 IBSI students to Soweto, Durban and Johannesburg, where they saw the strength of the Black-Jewish connection in South Africa and learned about the apartheid struggle. They met with members of Parliament, spoke with Black South Africans who support Israel, attended church and synagogue services and had a Shabbat dinner with Jewish community leaders. 

In June, the students will travel throughout Israel to see Nazareth, Galilee, Jerusalem and the tech sector in Tel Aviv. When the program is over, they will become IBSI ambassadors who, Washington says, will form “the hub of Black-Jewish synergy in their cities.” 

Combatting antisemitism from Kanye West, Kyrie Irving

Washington’s crusade to fortify Black-Jewish relationships is especially crucial during this time when openly antisemitic messages spread by celebrities such as Kanye West (Ye) and Kyrie Irving are becoming alarmingly mainstream.

The pastor explains why a lot of people are believing the propaganda. “These false teachings are exploiting the lack of understanding of Scripture. A lot of young men get pulled in looking for some sort of stability, looking for connectedness... it’s filling a void that’s there in terms of family and community... they get pulled into what’s essentially a cult.” 

One of the most dangerous aspects of this Jew hatred is how Black antisemites like Ye are joining forces with white supremacist neo-Nazis who claim to be leaving their racism behind in order to create a united front and fight those they both falsely perceive to be their common enemy – the Jewish people. 

“This has been an unholy alliance for a long time,” Washington says. “What Kanye has tapped into, as ignorant as he is of history, as probably emotionally disturbed as he is, is something that’s been going on since the days of [Jamaican activist] Marcus Garvey, back in the early 1900s, who worked with one of the leaders of the KKK. The same was true with Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad and the founder of the American Nazi Party who planned to join forces and decide this section of America was white, this section of America was Black, so they could stay separate from each other. 

“They agreed on one thing, that Jews have no place here. That’s the bitterness and the hatred that has connected those extreme groups for over a century.”

History of Black-Jewish unity

DESPITE THIS sinister momentum building beneath the surface, most Jewish and Black people stood united against segregation.

“We had a common enemy, which is why it was Jewish people who helped establish the NAACP, long before Dr. King was even born, at the turn of the 20th century. It’s the oldest civil rights organization in the world, and it was founded by Black and Jewish Americans,” Washington explains. “The threats were the same. The white racist who hated Black people also hated Jews; those who’d attack synagogues would attack churches.”

In 1909, Henry Moscowitz co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), of which Jewish American businessman and philanthropist Kivie Kaplan served as president from 1966 to 1975. In the early to mid-1900s, Julius Rosenwald, Jewish philanthropist and president of Sears, Roebuck & Co., partnered with African-American educator and presidential adviser Booker T. Washington to establish thousands of schools for young southern Black Americans who would have otherwise been deprived of an education.

Rosenwald’s passion for working with the Black community stemmed from strongly identifying with them. He stated, “The horrors that are due to race prejudice come home to the Jew more forcefully than to others of the white race, on account of the centuries of persecution which they have suffered and still suffer.”

In one of King’s impassioned speeches, he insisted that even if his Jewish brothers and sisters said they didn’t need his support, he “would still take a stand against antisemitism because it’s wrong, it’s unjust, and it’s evil.”

The support was mutual; Jewish leaders such as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel stood side by side with King during the 1965 Selma protest march, interlocking arms with each other. 

On June 12, 1964, King was arrested on the steps of the Monson Motor Lodge in St. Augustine, Florida, for trying to eat at a whites-only restaurant. He wrote a letter from prison to his close friend Rabbi Israel “Sy” Dresner, president of the Education Fund for Israeli Civil Rights and Peace, asking him to enlist support from rabbis to join him in the fight to end racial segregation.

The next day, Dresner, along with 16 other rabbis from 10 states, flew to Florida. They prayed and sang freedom songs at a slave market while white supremacists threw bricks and bottles. The following day, they were arrested for protesting in front of the Monson Motel. It was the largest mass arrest of rabbis in US history. At 3 a.m., they penned a manifesto from St. Johns County Jail titled “Why We Went,” which declared:

“We came to St. Augustine mainly because we could not stay away. We could not say no to Martin Luther King, whom we always respected and admired.... We came as Jews who remember the millions of faceless people who stood quietly, watching the smoke rise from Hitler’s crematoria. We came because we know that, second only to silence, the greatest danger to man is loss of faith in man’s capacity to act.” 

The St. Augustine movement for civil rights influenced the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which were drafted by Jewish, African-American and other civil rights leaders at the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism in Washington, DC.

THERE HAVE always been looming threats to the peaceful coexistence between Black and Jewish communities. Pastor Washington describes how King, toward the end of his life, was aware of a growing anti-Zionist movement. It started with the PLO, Farrakhan and the Black Panther Party, and today it’s threatening the safety and freedom of Jewish students at universities across the US and is showing up in the rhetoric of the Black Hebrew Israelites, the Jewish Voice for Peace and Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement activists. Next month, Washington is coming out with a documentary titled The Antisemitism of Black Lives Matter. 

King was always passionate about defending Israel and made no distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. At a dinner event in 1967, he reportedly rebuked a student’s anti-Zionist comments by stating, “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking antisemitism.”

King famously defended Israel at the annual convention of the Rabbinical Assembly in 1968, when he declared, “Peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all of our might to protect its right to exist.... I see Israel... as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world... an oasis of brotherhood and democracy.”

In 1967, King was planning a trip to Israel with 5,000 people to raise money for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was going to preach on the Mount of Olives and near Capernaum. Those plans never came to fruition because of the Six Day War; and a year later, King was assassinated. 

Echoing King’s words equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, Washington states, “Kids on campuses are learning that Jews are white and have white privilege, and that Israel is an apartheid state that is committing genocide. And those things stir up Jew hatred. So the people who say antisemitism and anti-Zionism are two separate things, they are wrong.” He adds, “If you use that same language with any other group and say, ‘I don’t have a problem with Japanese people, but Japan doesn’t have the right to exist,’ everybody would call you an idiot, everybody would call you crazy, everybody would call you a genocidist. But somehow you could say those words together with Israel and nobody blinks an eye.”

One of the reasons Washington took his group to South Africa was to disprove the accusation that Israel is an apartheid state. He says, “When I heard Israel being called racist [and] a Jim Crow state... those things hit me emotionally because I knew that was not true.... That was my people’s heritage. So now they’re taking my legacy, right? And not only are they lying about Israel, but they’re completely making a mockery of what my family went through.”

Black-Jewish/Israel unity today

Washington explains that there is a disconnect between South Africa’s ruling political party, the African National Congress, which is anti-Israel, and the general consensus of the public, which he does not believe is against Jews or Israel.

He and the IBSI ambassadors visited the South African Jewish Museum in Cape Town, where they saw video footage of Nelson Mandela speaking about Jewish activists who helped to dismantle apartheid, which mirrored their fight against racial segregation in the US.

Washington states, “The embeddedness of the Jewish community throughout South Africa is something that’s very present. What you have is these different ventures that are helping the poor, helping those who don’t have education.... It is not uncommon to see Jewish community members, whether they’re religious or not, whether they’re rabbis or not, represented throughout the nation wherever there’s a need.”

Washington tells of how Nando’s, a restaurant chain with over 1,200 outlets in 30 countries, was co-founded by Jewish South African businessman Robert Brozin. The chain’s headquarters is based in a severely economically depressed area in Johannesburg.

“They are in one of the roughest neighborhoods, but they refuse to leave,” Washington explains. “They are empowering other Black South Africans in their small businesses... they’re literally changing lives.”

Washington and the IBSI ambassadors helped to garden at a school built on top of a garbage dump, where about 3,000 kids were packed into a tiny structure with temporary walls that serves as a school building. Because of a drought, there was no running water to irrigate their garden, which was oftentimes the children’s only source of food.

To restore the water supply, Rabbi Ramon Widmonte, co-founder and dean of the Academy of Jewish Thought and Learning, implemented an Israeli drip irrigation system called Netafim and taught the teachers and students about water conservation, sustainable food growth and recycling. Through his Thirst for Hope initiative, young people learn how to become self-sufficient through planting and growing their own food.

Widmonte says, “We looked for areas where we could bring together all of those components, both education and Israel, and make a difference to the non-Jewish community.” He is currently working toward implementing these programs in 300 more schools across South Africa. 

Washington and his group also planted trees at Philisa Abafazi Bethu (“Heal Our Women”), a Cape Town community center which offers rehabilitative services for survivors of abuse.

Ben Getz, Jewish founder and managing director of Urban Harvest Edible Gardens, installed a sizable vegetable, fruit and herbal garden at the center and taught the people there how to grow food in an environmentally friendly way.

Many of Urban Harvest’s gardens serve people from poor and disadvantaged communities, such as at the school for the hearing impaired, where Urban Harvest is located.

A LOVE for Israel and the Jewish people runs in Pastor Washington’s family, and this love is also expressed though music.

A singer and musician, Washington graduated from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in 1989. In 2014, he formed The Hebrew Project Artists, a band that performs gospel and Jewish songs in Hebrew and English, sometimes blending them together with elements of jazz. They perform at churches and synagogues and at events like StandWithUs’ Festival of Lights Hanukkah celebration.

Washington’s son, Joshua, is the musical director and director of IBSI. The pastor’s daughter-in-law, Olga Meshoe Washington, is the CEO of Defend, Embrace, Invest, Support Israel. 

IBSI is planning a church leader version of the P.E.A.C.E. Initiative for 2023 called IBSI Pastors, where Black American and African pastors from across the country will also travel to Africa and Israel.

Washington states, “It’s our intention to eventually take hundreds of church leaders on this journey. We believe that as we empower these pastors with true knowledge of the Africa-Israel, Black-Jewish connection, we will bring light where there is a real battle against the darkness of hatred and strife. By God’s grace, we’re going to change the world.”  

Institute for Black Solidarity for Israel can be found at: www.ibsi.org