(RNS) — With two new congregations led by and for African American and Caribbean Jews, Washington, D.C. is emerging as a center of Black Jewish life in the United States.
Ohel Eidot Chemdat’a (“Tent of the Precious Congregations”), or OEC for short, will hold its first Shabbat evening service in a rented building in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C., on March 20. The group’s founder, Rabbi Shais Rishon, will lead the service.
“Every other Jewish ethnicity or culture gets to have its own space,” Rishon, a prolific writer and speaker who is best known in the Jewish world by his pen name, MaNishtana, said in an interview. “You have Ashkenazi shuls (synagogues), Sephardi, Persian, Syrian, Russian, Bukharian, Egyptian, Moroccan. It’s about time we stopped being guests in other people’s houses.”
OEC is the second Black-led Jewish congregation to launch in D.C. in the past six months. Kehillat Sankofa held High Holiday services last fall at a private D.C. home. Rabbi Koach Baruch Frazier formed the community in part because he had trouble finding a pulpit position after graduating from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 2024.
“There didn’t seem to be a place that could accept me as a leader,” said Frazier, who is trans and the founder of the Black Trans Torah Club.
At the same time, Frazier was hearing from other Black Jews in the Washington area that they longed for a congregation “that puts them at the center, as opposed to one that just sa …