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Ahuvah Gray | |
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| Born | Delores Gray Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
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| 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.
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]
While working for Continental Airlines, she married; she and her husband divorced amicably after 16 years, and had no childen. [1]
Gray remains close with her non-Jewish family, who were supportive of her conversion. [1]