The first time 6-year-old Bibi Shapiro found out just how widely viewed the video of him singing “Avinu Malkeinu” had been, he was sitting on his mother’s lap in Australia being beamed into Yom Kippur services at one of the largest synagogues in the United States.
Like so many others who saw the video over the past several weeks, Angela Buchdahl, the senior rabbi of New York City’s Central Synagogue, was touched by the passion Shapiro brought to his performance. She also noted that Bibi, who is Black, did not conform to stereotypes about what Jews look like, the topic of her Kol Nidre sermon.
So Buchdahl reached out — and began a conversation that ended with Bibi leading her congregation in the iconic High Holiday song.
“Our community just got to hear you sing and I think our hearts are all just opened up,” the rabbi told the Perth boy before his performance. Afterwards, she said, “Connecting with both of you today — it feels like that’s what reminds us that we are a huge Jewish family.”
That was the theme of Buchdahl’s Kol Nidre sermon, in which she argued that Jews should stop thinking of themselves as a race — a historically dangerous, exclusionary concept — and instead as a family.
Buchdahl told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that she had reached out to Bibi and his mother, Nina Shapiro, after reflecting on her own experiences as a Korean-American woman who, despite holding one of the most influential pulpits in American Judaism, still elicits confusion when people learn she is Jewish.
“I was taken with how clearly Bibi’s Jewish neshama [soul] comes through, and how much is at stake for us to make sure he never feels as marginalized and othered as so many Jews of color feel in our community,” Buchdahl told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about her outreach.
