The Catholic Priest Who Became an Orthodox Jew – Tablet Magazine
n March of 1979 People magazine featured an unusual celebrity in one of its brief, punchy articles. While the story, titled Onetime Catholic Priest Abraham Carmel Celebrates His 25th Year as an Orthodox Jew, opened and closed with celebrity-style quotes ( Some people are born musicians & I was a born believer ), the substance of the account was remarkably sober. Before he converted to Judaism, Carmel had served as a Catholic priest for 10 years. And the Catholic Church was not his first spiritual home. He had grown up in London in an Anglican family and turned to Catholicism in his 20s. During his quarter century as an Orthodox Jew Carmel had been an influential educator, and in 1979, in his late 60s, he embarked on an American lecture tour to convert Jews to Judaism. Carmel s claim that he was the first fully ordained Catholic priest to convert to Judaism in 900 years was perhaps an overstatement. But that hyperbole did not make the life story of Kenneth Charles Cox (for that was his given name) any less remarkable.