Abraham Marley, the grandson of renowned Jamaican reggae musician Bob Marley, became a bar mitzvah recently.
“I share this photo of Abraham and I from his celebration of becoming a man,” the young man’s father Ziggy Marley wrote in mid-June. “According to the ancient tradition, he has reached that age of responsibility and change.”
The bar mitzvah boy’s mother, Orly Agai Marley, is Israeli and has Iranian-Jewish ancestry, per Israeli media. She was “formerly a vice president at William Morris Agency, now the head of Ziggy’s record label,” Vogue reported.
One of Bob Marley’s most celebrated songs is “Exodus,” which includes the lyrics, “Send us another brother Moses.”
On a tour of Israel in 2018, the family celebrated the bat mitzvah of Judah—Abraham’s sister—Ziggy Marley told Caribbean Heritage Magazine.
“When asked about Judah’s reaction to being in the ceremony as well as growing up in an interfaith household, Marley, who is Rastafarian and his wife, Jewish, says, ‘My life, how I live, can’t be defined,’” reported the magazine. “I don’t want to be defined by what people’s idea of what things are supposed to be. Yes, I am Rasta, but I define myself.”
“When she sees my life, she doesn’t see a Rastafarian, or a Jewish life or whatever stereotypical thing that means,” he said of his daughter. “We don’t connect to people’s ideas of what things are supposed to be. We just live how we live. We live with love and this is what she sees.”
