After recently staging a weeklong hunger strike to protest the Israeli government’s refusal to grant him citizenship, Maryland native David Ben Moshe says he finally received the green light for aliyah.
“In response to a written guarantee that I will receive my Aliyah status on Jan 1, 2023, I have called off the Hunger Strike,” he posted on Facebook on Jan. 11. “Thank you for the overwhelming love and support.”
A Frederick native who relocated to Baltimore for several years and graduated from Towson University with a degree in exercise science, Ben Moshe, 34, now lives in the western Jerusalem neighborhood of Motza.
He discovered Judaism a decade ago while incarcerated in federal prison for 30 months on drug and firearms charges.
After his release in 2012, Ben Moshe — who was born David Bonett and is Black and raised Christian — converted to Judaism four years ago through B’nai Israel Synagogue’s Rabbi Etan Mintz and married under Orthodox law in Israel. He first applied for citizenship under Israel’s Law of Return three-and-a-half years ago.
Ben Moshe, who works a personal trainer and fitness coach, won a social justice fellowship from the Pardes Institute for Jewish Studies in Jerusalem and is engaged in myriad social justice causes, including teaching exercise activities to children with special needs.
In late 2020, Israel’s Interior Ministry extended Ben Moshe’s visa for another year but declined to grant him citizenship, even though he is married to an Israeli citizen, Tamar Gresser Ben Moshe, and has two Israeli-born children.
“The applicant has a criminal history, and the reason that he has only been given a residency permit stems from these reasons and no other ones,” a spokesman for Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority of the Interior Ministry said in a statement.
In a 2020 interview with Jmore, Ben Moshe said, “Israel is often unfairly painted as a racist and discriminatory place, and I don’t like making Israel look bad. But unfortunately, the Ministry of the Interior has chosen to embarrass Israel in the way that they have handled my case. … To them, I am a Black convert with a criminal record instead of a person who can bring value and diversity to Israeli society.”
Ben Moshe described the ordeal of fighting for citizenship as “stressful on so many levels. … It is like playing a game where the other side made all the rules but only follows the rules when it helps them, and ignores the rules when they are in your favor. The only word to describe the situation is Kafkaesque.”
Ben Moshe said he wanted to make aliyah out of a “love for the state of Israel and the Jewish people. After experiencing discrimination in the U.S. that left me with my business closed and lease canceled and nothing to do, I knew it was time to come to Israel. All we want to do is raise a Jewish family in the state of Israel.”
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