10 February 28 • 2019
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BARBARA LEWIS CONTRIBUTING WRITER
L
ike the ancient Israelites, they’
ve
come “out of Goshen” and found
their promised land. For the
Wormsley family, paradise is a 10-acre
wooded site near Farwell, pretty much
smack in the middle of Michigan’
s Lower
Peninsula.
David and Ashley Wormsley and their
six children, age 2-18, sold their house in
Florida and spent many months looking
for their ideal homestead. They moved
into their three-story geodesic dome
house in October. Baby Tovia was born
a few weeks later, bringing their family
to nine.
Despite being so far away from the
organized Jewish community, the family
tries hard to live an observant Jewish life.
David, 49, was born Jewish but says his
parents were “very secular.
” Ashley, 35,
grew up in a Protestant family; when she
met Eric, she said, she knew she wanted
to be Jewish.
She has not formally converted.
She and Eric gain most of their Jewish
knowledge from reading, from online
resources such as alphabeta.org, and
from the Torah itself. They regard them-
selves as Karaite Jews, following the
strictures laid out in the Torah but not
many of the laws and practices from the
Talmudic/rabbinic period. For exam-
ple, Karaite Jews recognize patrilineal
descent. The Karaites stem from an
ancient sect that split from mainstream
(Rabbinic) Judaism around the 7th cen-
tury CE. (See sidebar on right.)
For Eric, originally from New York,
wandering in the wilderness took less
than 40 years — but it was close. He
joined the Navy after high school to
see the world, worked as an electrician
and visited 13 countries. In 1991, while
serving in the first Persian Gulf war, he
developed an epilepsy-type disorder
that causes seizures and numbness;
he received a medical discharge. The
Veterans Administration now regards
him as permanently disabled.
Ashley was born at Providence
Hospital in Southfield but moved away
as a young child. The Wormsleys met
in Colorado, where their families were
neighbors. They married while Ashley
was still in her teens. Eric graduated
from Colorado State University and
Ashley got an associate’
s degree. They
started having children.
They moved to Kansas City, where
Eric earned a degree in chiropractic
medicine. He practiced for a while but
gave it up when his brain disorder affect-
ed the feeling in his fingers.
The growing family moved to Florida,
where they lived for 10 years. Eric taught
anatomy and physiology at a nursing
college. The older children — Naomi,
now 18, Hannah, 16, and Samuel, 13
— attended a private school when they
lived in south Florida. When they moved
to Pensacola, Eric and Ashley were
unhappy with the schools and started
homeschooling.
FINDING A NEW HOME
A few years ago, they began to feel
Florida wasn’
t right for them. It was too
hot, home- schooling regulations were
too strict and land was expensive. They
wanted to find a place that had four sea-
sons, liberal homeschooling laws, good
benefits for disabled vets and acreage
they could afford on their limited bud-
get, where they could be as self-sufficient
as possible.
They sold their Florida home in early
2018, bought a trailer large enough to
sleep eight and a van strong enough to
tow it and began traveling.
They thought they’
d found a place in
Colorado, close to Ashley’
s family, but
the deal fell through and they started
having second thoughts about the state.
“We arrived here (in Michigan) in
June and almost immediately realized we
loved the state,
” Eric said. They just had
to find a large house on land they could
work at a price they could afford. As
soon as they saw the 2,700-square-foot
dome on West Herrick Road, they knew
that was the place.
Homesteading is a lot of work, as
is caring for a family of nine. The
Wormsleys live frugally, depending on
Eric’
s VA benefits and income from
ads on their YouTube channel, Out of
Goshen, a vlog — video blog — they
started when they decided to leave
Florida.
Erics posts a new entry almost every
day except Shabbat and Jewish holidays,
and the family has amassed a following
of 19,000 viewers. Dozens of fans sent
housewarming and new-baby gifts.
“We were visiting my family in New
York and we went into a kosher restau-
rant and someone recognized us from
the channel,
” said Eric. “That was pretty
cool.
”
jews d
in
the
What is a Karaite?
Imagine some of the ways your life
would be different if you accepted
the validity of Torah law but not of the
Talmud, also known as
the “oral law”:
You would eat only
kosher meat and fish,
because that is decreed
in Leviticus. But aside
from cooking an animal
in its mother’
s milk
— or with a certain kind of fat, which
is another way of interpreting the
Leviticus verse — you would not be
prohibited from mixing milk and meat.
You would take your shoes off in
the synagogue and prostrate yourself
during prayer. You would not need a
minyan for certain prayers.
You would not light candles for
Shabbat because that command is
mentioned nowhere in the Torah. And
you might not celebrate Chanukah, a
post-biblical holiday.
You would follow patrilineal descent,
where having a Jewish father, not
mother, determines if you’
re a member
of the tribe. And, if you were a woman
in an unhappy marriage, you could
divorce your husband.
Jews who follow such practices are
known as Karaites, an ancient sect
that split from mainstream (Rabbinic)
Judaism around the 7th century CE.
The movement crystallized in Baghdad,
but, for many years, the largest popu-
lation was in Egypt. The Egyptian com-
munity relocated, mostly to Israel, after
the Six-Day War.
“Karaite” is an Anglicized form of
the Hebrew word karaim or bnei mikra,
which means “followers of scripture.”
Karaites, in general, study and
respect the Talmud and rabbinic reli-
gious rulings but don’
t feel bound by
them.
Mireille Plotke of Beverly Hills grew
up in a Karaite family in Cairo, Egypt,
but has not practiced as a Karaite
since she left in 1960 at age 16. She
is now a member of Congregation
Shaarey Zedek. She remembers her
family had many customs most Jews
would find usual. They did not cele-
brate Chanukah and did not consider
chicken to be meat, for example.
Their
‘Promised Land’
Large family of Karaite Jews tries homesteading
in the Lower Peninsula.
Mireille Plotke
The Wormsley
family in the
geodesic dome
home in Farwell
continued on page 12
continued on page 12