By Dvora Meyers
 

On a sodden Sunday, I sneak into an abandoned building in the Bronx with Benjy Melendez, a tall mustachioed man and founder of the Ghetto Brothers, a rough street gang that helped give the borough its violent reputation in the late 1960s. We enter through a door whose bolt has already been broken. Once a thriving synagogue and Jewish community center known as Intervale, the building is now in ruins, its front covered in graffiti and obscured by scaffolding. Above the main entrance, Beit Knesset Anshei Minsk D’Bronx, the Synagogue of People from Minsk in the Bronx, is etched in Hebrew letters. Right inside there is a blue wooden chair. “This was the rabbi’s chair,” Melendez says. “He used to sit outside.” We venture downstairs, past the peeling paint and into the sanctuary, wet thanks to a ceiling full of holes. Rain drips on our heads, the floor is soft underfoot, and the entire place reeks of urine and rat droppings.
 

Melendez spies a small wooden ark on a table and wrenches a pair of carved tablets, lettered aleph through yud, or one through 10, and representing the Ten Commandments, from the top.
 

The relic Melendez carries out is emblematic of his beliefs and practice. He is a Spanish Jew who adheres fervently and almost exclusively to the Written Law, or what is written in the Hebrew Bible and not in the Talmud or other Jewish commentary. Like his father, Melendez reads to his children from the Bible every Friday night. When I note that one of the legacies of the Spanish Jewry from which he descends are sages like Maimonides and Joseph Caro, who added important works to the Oral Tradition, he says “I don’t want to adhere to the rabbis’ way.” The same independent spirit that led him to start his own gang now informs his present religious observances.
 

Melendez has gone his own way—from gang leader to religiosity. His journey resonates with me; it is the opposite of mine. I was raised in an insular Orthodox community in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, but my religious practice has become much more subtle and flexible as I’ve plunged into the worlds of underground hip-hop and breakdancing, both rooted in the gang scene of which Melendez was once a fixture. For him, though, Judaism now takes center stage, though the path from young man in the brutal South Bronx to adult in a tallit was hardly an obvious one.
 

This article originally appeared on Tabletmag.com. To read the rest, please visit http://www.tabletmag.com/life-and-religion/37906/blood-brother/.