KARAITES IN AMERICA:

Playing the Part of ‘Rav’ for San Francisco’s Karaite Community
Q&A
Daniel Treiman | Mon. Aug 06, 2007 (The Forward)

By day, Joe Pessah is a marketing applications manager for a tech company in California’s Silicon Valley. In his spare time, however, the 62-year-old Mountain View resident pursues a much more unusual vocation.

Pessah is the “acting rav” for America’s Karaite community, a now-tiny Jewish sect that broke more than a millennium ago with rabbinic Judaism. While adhering to the Jewish Bible, the Tanakh, Karaites rejected the divine origin of the Mishnah, or Oral Law, and the authority of the Talmud.

Karaites maintain many practices that set them apart from mainstream contemporary Jews (known to Karaites as “Rabbanites”). Hewing closely to what they see as the Tanakh’s plain meaning, Karaites do not extend the biblical prohibition against cooking a calf in its mother’s milk into a sweeping ban on mixing meat and dairy. (They’ll eat chicken and dairy together, and some will eat beef with dairy so long as they’re not from the same source.) On some matters though, the Karaites are more stringent than other Jews. For instance, they believe that the prohibition on kindling fires on the Sabbath bans cooking and electricity use. (That means hot plates and light timers are out.)

At one time, Karaites posed a vigorous challenge to rabbinic authority. Today, however, their global population is estimated at only about 30,000, most living in Israel, where they have a number of synagogues.

The Karaites’ only North American synagogue, Congregation B’nai Israel in the San Francisco suburb of Daly City, serves a population of immigrants from Egypt. ...