News Brief

(IsraelNN.com) Barack Obama's wife’s cousin is a Rabbi, according to the Jewish magazine Forward. Michelle Obama's first cousin once removed, Capers Funnye (pronounced fuh-NAY) shepherds the flock at a mostly black Israelite synagogue on Chicago’s South Side, the Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew synagogue. 

Forward reports that Mrs. Obama's paternal grandfather, Frasier Robinson Jr., and Rabbi Funnye’s mother, Verdelle Robinson Funnye, were brother and sister.

Rabbi Funnye is a convert, first in a conversion supervised by the Black Israelite rabbis, later in a second procedure, reportedly supervised by Orthodox and Conservative rabbis. He has a Black Israelite ordination.

Black Jewish congregations, often called Black Hebrews, are a very small and mostly separate stream from mainstream Judaism. Rabbi Funnye works to bridge those gaps.

Although Rabbi Funnye's congregation refers to itself as Ethiopian Hebrew, it is not connected to the Ethiopian Jews who have come home to Israel en masse in past decades. Those call their communities Beta Israel.