JERUSALEM – The spiritual leader of the African Hebrew Israelites, a polygamous vegan movement that believes its members are the descendants of an ancient Israelite tribe, has died in the southern Israeli town where he brought his followers four decades ago, a spokeswoman says.
Ben Ammi Ben Israel died on Saturday at the age of 75, the group said.
He was born Ben Carter in the US in 1939.
He maintained that some black US citizens were descendants of the biblical tribe of Judah.
He said they migrated to west Africa after the destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in AD 70 and were eventually sold as slaves to the US.
In 1966, he had a vision that the angel Gabriel told him to “return to the holy land by way in which we came,” Yafah Baht Gavriel, a spokeswoman for the group said.
He then gathered his few hundred followers, mainly from Chicago, and led them to Liberia, the west African republic settled by freed slaves in the 19th century.
In a statement, the group said that time was spent “shedding the many detrimental habits that as an enslaved people, they had acquired”.
They moved to Israel in 1969 and settled in Dimona, a poverty-stricken town in the southern Negev desert, which was then a melting pot for immigrants.
