It takes a good eye and decent coordination to drive a tank for the Israel Defense Forces. A knowledge of world religions? Not so much.
Yet that's exactly the skill set that Korey Bronson, who has been a Jew, Christian, Muslim and now Jew again, brings to the IDF.
Bronson, 21, was born in Philadelphia to a Jewish mother and an African-American father. He grew up as an Christian, celebrating Christmas and Easter and going to church on Sunday.
After his father died of cancer, his mother married a devout Muslim. Bronson was about 13 at the time, but instead of celebrating his bar mitzvah, he and the rest of family converted to Islam.
"I learned to read Arabic, I was praying five times everyday - the whole nine yards," the skullcap-wearing corporal told Anglo File recently during a phone interview from his army base. "I was living according to the rules of Islam, I held them very closely to my heart. I believe that if you do something you do it all the way and not halfway."
The passage from church to mosque was not difficult, Bronson says, since both religions have a common denominator. "I thought: No matter what the religion is, there is just one God, there are only different ways of serving him. I figured that I'd be continuing serving God, just in a different manner," he says.
Bronson's mother, a prison guard by trade, didn't hide from her children that they were technically Jewish. It just wasn't the family's religion of choice at the time, he says. His first exposure to Judaism followed a visit by his mother's brother, who had recently become observant.
"It was a Friday afternoon," Bronson remembers. "He was wearing a black hat, white shirt, the whole get-up. When I looked at him, being all ignorant, I told him: 'Hey, why are you dressed up like this, church is on Sunday.' He looks at me and goes: 'Yeah, church might be on Sunday, but Shabbat is today.' I said: 'What does that mean?' He said: 'you're Jewish and you should know that.'"
The uncle invited Bronson and his brother to join him for the weekend to learn about Shabbat.
"The funny part was, when we packed our bags and got ready to leave the house, my mother said: 'Have fun guys, but don't get your suits dirty, you need to go to church on Sunday!'" Bronson was 7 at the time, and the experience did not leave a lasting impression on him. "I knew I was a Jew but I never knew what it meant to be Jewish," he says.
By the time Bronson was 15, a devout Muslim, he occasionally found himself worshipping on three different days during one weekend: on Friday with his stepfather, on Shabbat with his uncle and on Sunday out of habit.
But Bronson was not satisfied with his spiritual life. He started looking into yet other religions, hence a yin-yang symbol tattooed on his forearm.
"I really dug deep into this and learned lots of interesting things. But there was nothing that pulled me," he says. "I always felt there was a missing component. My mother taught us to always want something more, to always pursue the next step and never be satisfied with what you have achieved. So I wanted to find out what that lacking component was."
Feeling emotional emptiness and a "lack of happiness," it struck him that he never really explored his Judaism. He asked his uncle if he could stay with him in New Jersey for a few weeks to learn more about being Orthodox. He ended up staying for three years.
Learning to read Hebrew in about a week, Bronson recalls, he received a scholarship at a yeshiva high school and upon graduation enrolled in a yeshiva in Ma'alot-Tarshiha, a city near Nahariyah where he still lives.
Since March 2009, he has served voluntarily for the IDF, which earlier this ear selected him to be one of 120 soldiers to receive a special achievement award by President Peres.
Currently in the process of immigrating, Bronson dreams of being accepted into a commanders' course in the armored corps. His superiors would rather see him in an intelligence unit, but Bronson - a confident man who today seems to know exactly what he wants from life - told Anglo File he intends on proving them that he has what it takes for the job. "I'm not going to take [no] without a fight, this is what I want."
Bronson really fell in love with tanks. "There is no better way of knowing a person," he explains. "When you sit inside a tank with another person you're learning how to rely on him. And the beautiful thing is these are people you might never approach in your civilian life. But when you're in the army all your differences are taken away, you sweat in the same uniforms and now you're working together and you have to trust the other people with your life."
This interdependence creates the strongest bonds, he adds. "There's no such things as friends when it comes to tanks. Everyone is family."
His biological family still observes Islam, but that doesn't make for bad relations, Bronson says. He speaks to his mother once a week, yet rarely about politics.
"She never calls this place Palestine, she definitely says Israel," he laughs. She has yet to visit the country, he says.
"I'm hoping maybe she'll come for my wedding, God-willing, when the day comes."
