Ahuvah Gray
 | The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guideline for biographies. (January 2021) |
Ahuvah Gray | |
|---|---|
| Born | Delores Gray Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Website | |
| ahuvahgray | |
Ahuva Gray (born 1944 or 1945) is an American writer on religion and memoirist. She is a former Baptist minister who converted to Judaism and chronicled her changing beliefs in the book My Sister, the Jew, published in 2001.
Biography
[edit]Gray is African-American and was born to a Baptist working-class family in the Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago. She is a relative of baseball player Lorenzo Gray.[citation needed] Each summer, she and her siblings visited her sharecropper grandparents in Mound Bayou, Mississippi.[1] Her first experience with Judaism was in seventh grade, when she began working in a dress shop owned by a Jewish family.[2]
After college, Gray worked for 23 years for Continental Airlines, working first as a flight attendant and later becoming an executive.[1] After Continental Airlines transferred Gray to Los Angeles, she became involved in a Baptist church, and was later ordained at the International Assemblies of God in San Diego.[1][3] Gray's church emphasized Christianity's Jewish roots, leading her to interact with local Jewish leaders and academics and to begin leading tour groups in the Middle East.[1] She also began to pray using the Jewish siddur.[1] She found herself disagreeing with some Christian dogma, such as original sin and the trinity.[2][3]
After a 1994 earthquake in California, Gray moved to Israel.[1] Wanting to study Judaism further, she entered the Nishmat College for Women in Jerusalem and supported herself by cleaning homes.[1] In 1996, at age 51,[1] she completed conversion through the Jerusalem beth din to become an Orthodox Jew.[1] She took the name of Ahuva.[4]
In Israel, Gray has worked as a tour guide, and as a lecturer abroad. Gray has lived in Bayit VeGan, Jerusalem since the mid-1990s.[1][4] She identified as Haredi.[1]
Personal life
[edit]While working for Continental Airlines, she married; she and her husband divorced amicably after 16 years, and had no children.[1]
Gray remains close with her non-Jewish family, who were supportive of her conversion.[1]
References
[edit]- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Schiller, Mordechai (22 May 2006). "Go Where I Send Thee: A Former Minister Finds Torah". Jewish Action. Retrieved 15 October 2025.
- ^ a b Sarah, Shapiro. "Gifts of a Convert". Aish.com.
- ^ a b Radoszkowicz, Abigail (9 November 2001). "From Sister Delores to my sister the Jew". The Jerusalem Post. Archived from the original on 27 July 2010. Retrieved 3 August 2010 – via ahuvahgray.com.
- ^ a b "Ahuva Gray". Jewishmag.com. February 2003. Retrieved 3 August 2010.
Bibliography
[edit]- My Sister the Jew. Philipp Feldheim Inc. 2001. ISBN 1-56871-276-6.
- Gifts of a Stranger: A Convert's Round-the-world Travels and Spiritual Journeys. Targum Press. 2004. ISBN 978-1-56871-331-1.
External links
[edit]- Ahuvah Gray
- Gifts of a Convert
- From Baptist to Beshert
- From Mississippi to Mount Sinai Archived 18 February 2020 at the Wayback Machine
- Living people
- 1940s births
- 21st-century African-American women writers
- 21st-century African-American writers
- 21st-century American Jews
- 21st-century American memoirists
- 21st-century American women writers
- African-American former Christians
- African-American Jews
- American emigrants to Israel
- American Haredim
- Converts to Judaism from Baptist denominations
- Converts to Orthodox Judaism
- Flight attendants
- Israeli people of African-American descent
- Jewish American memoirists
- Jewish women non-fiction writers
- Jewish American women writers
- Writers from Chicago