Welcome Home, Karen Yemima

If it is true that “Jews are news,” then it is even more true that “new Jews are even more news.” I am talking about the recent discovery that a prominent Orthodox rabbi in Washington, DC had been secretly photographing women in the mikveh, as well as compelling prospective converts to do menial work for him and otherwise abusing his authority.

This is fifty shades of awful. A shanda. A hillul ha-shem (desecration of God’s name). Something that brings disrepute to the entire beautiful mitzvah of mikvah. Something that throws obstacles in the path of converts. All we can do is pray that the victims of his voyeurism will heal; that his congregation will heal; that his family will heal; that he, himself, will be healed of his compulsions – his yetzer ha-ra having taken on King Kong proportions; and that people will continue to join the Jewish people.

Which they will. Which they do. Because the DC story is not the only conversion story out there. No way. Not by a long shot.

Time for something a little bit more uplifting.

Last week, there was a horrific terror attack at a light rail station in Jerusalem. It claimed the life of a three month old infant, Chaya Zissel Braun, who was also an American citizen, and whose family had just taken her to the Western Wall for the first time.
But just the other day, another victim of that attack succumbed to her wounds. That victim’s story contains its own measure of overwhelming pain, but a tiny bit of sweetness as well.

The victim was a 22 year old Ecuadorian woman named Karen Yemima Mosquera. She had been in the process of converting to Judaism, and had come to Israel to finish the process, when she was fatally wounded in Jerusalem. She was buried in Jerusalem, and hundreds of people came to her funeral – including the mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, and the Ecuadorian ambassador to Israel. In fact, the State of Israel flew her parents and sister to Israel for the funeral – on the “tab” of the Jewish State, in keeping with protocol when a foreign citizen is seriously wounded in a terror attack.

Tragic, yes? Poignant, yes? But, in the words of the old cliché, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” Check out who else was at the funeral. http://www.vosizneias.com/182339/2014/10/26/jerusalem-hundreds-attend-the-funeral-of-ecuadorian-woman-killed-in-jerusalem-terror-attack/ Note, please, the color of the hats, and the solemnity with which their inhabitants stand guard around her body. Note, please, that a hevra kaddisha (a “holy society,” responsible for caring for the dead) tended to her funeral.

I saw the beauty of my people at the funeral of righteous convert (Karen) Yemima Mosquera. The motley graced the fashionable, there was black and army green. Ear locks, dreadlocks, the wealthy and the poor. Some were stoic, more were weeping at the funeral of someone who attained perfection in half the time it takes most people to pay off a mortgage.

She made us beautiful.

Upstaged by an infant, she had almost escaped notice. We’d forgotten that a convert is as new a creation, new to this world, to our people, as an infant in like measure. We let her slip away as we filled our minds with tender pink thoughts of babies brutalized. Raw we were, too raw to think of anything else.