Ahuvah Gray

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 children.^[1]

Gray remains close with her non-Jewish family, who were supportive of her conversion.^[1]