The International Israelite Board of Rabbis is the oldest historically African American Rabbinical board in the United States, whose founders preserved synagogues in Black neighborhoods in New York City and Chicago, and whose teachings launched the spread of nonviolent Torah observance[1] among thousands of African-American Jewish and Black Hebrew Israelite adherents since 1919.
While the International Israelite Board of Rabbis has a century-long congregational history, the trend of broader recognition of the Board and its constituent Rabbis as equal to other American Jewish leaders has accelerated since the 2019 centennial celebration of its oldest congregation and the heightened focus on Black–Jewish relations during the ensuing racial unrest in the United States (2020-Present).
Congregational worship among constituents of the International Israelite Board of Rabbis can be characterized as Conservadox, complementarian, and based on Sephardic liturgy (using the ArtScroll Siddur as their standard prayerbook).
The African Israelite minhag, which is the cultural expression of their Judaism, uses the upper register of African-American culture as the basis for preserving the positive communal aspects of the Black church in generations past and advancing a positive connection to Africa via the Black Arts Movement, while also serving as a bulwark against assimilation into antisocial urban subcultures.
He also presides over the ordination of the Rabbis, and serves as the Rosh Yeshiva of the Israelite Academy (founded in 1925 as the Ethiopian Hebrew Rabbinical College).