Dr. Yehudah Pryce, gangster turned Orthodox Jew, helps young people who’ve been arrested put their lives back on track

Photos: Levi Lehman

The first thing that grabs you is the sweetness of his smile.  You can’t miss the crinkling of his eyes and the openness of his face, which radiate warmth and refinement and an eagerness to engage.  Bearded and besuited, he removes his black hat and deliberately places it on the table in front of him like a rebbi settling into shiur. Meet Yehudah Pryce: dedicated Jew, devoted family man, social worker — and former violent gangster.

Because that’s exactly what he was for the first three decades of his life.

Raised by his Sri Lankan mother and Caucasian stepfather in a lower-middle-class town in Orange County, California, populated by mostly Mexicans, Asians, and whites, the dark-brown skin that Omar Pryce inherited from his biological Jamaican father was a rarity in his town, his school, and even his home. From a very young age, he felt like a stranger in his own world.

“By the time I was eight, I would lie awake at night pondering who I was. I struggled with the feeling of not fitting in,” Yehudah says today of the Omar of his childhood. “I was bullied and harassed for being black, and I absorbed the message that there was something inherently wrong with me. I saw my father very inconsistently, and so I had no black role model to negate that message and set a positive example for living a moral and successful life. Well-meaning people would tell me I’m not really black since my family was white — my three half-siblings are light-skinned — and I’d ruminate on that, but it left me even more confused.”

Eventually, young Omar concluded that the rules of society were made up by people.

“They have no value in and of themselves, so I have no obligation to follow them,” he remembers thinking.

Thus, unmoored from moral restraint, his downward slide came so early and fast — by eight he was stealing baseball cards from grocery stores and getting into physical fights in the neighborhood — that by fifth grade, he says, he already turned his life back around. But his good behavior didn’t last long, and by the time Yehudah/Omar was 13, he was a full-fledged gangster, carrying guns, selling drugs, fighting, and hanging out with gang members.

For a kid with a poorly defined sense of identity, the lure of belonging to a group exerted a gravitational pull.

“Being in a gang makes you part of an extended family that will do anything to protect its own. You know exactly what you need to do in order to belong. As long as I carried out gang exploits, I had an identity that couldn’t be challenged,” Yehudah explains.

“I discovered that the black macho persona earned me respect, power, and even fear. It was considered cool to be someone who broke the rules, and at parties and school events other kids looked at me with awe — I’ll be honest, it was a fun life. And crazy as it sounds, I showed up at school every day, took honors classes in high school and even some AP classes. My mother and stepfather did their best to rein me in, but nothing stopped me — if I was grounded, I’d just sneak out the window.”