He told the New York Post: “I just wanted to see if it was true, I wanted to see if it was real.”
He said finding out that he is 2.4 per cent Ashkenazi Jewish on the side of his mother’s maternal great, great-grandmother was “a beautiful gift from God,”
He credits his Jewish faith with helping him through the darkest period of his life, following the death of his 19-year-old son Josh, the breakdown of his marriage, and the loss of his mother to a fentanyl overdose.
While in recovery in Los Angeles, California for alcohol and drug abuse in 2019, he met his sponsor, a Jewish man he nicknamed his “recovery rabbi” who helped him find his faith.
“The thing I loved about Judaism is that it says, ‘Love the Lord your God’, and that you don’t need to force your God on nobody else. I want to try and build this relationship with God,” Meeink said.
He continues to call his “recovery rabbi” every morning at 8am and says Judaism has given him “humbleness, humility” and the desire to stand up for others.
Meeink had a violent and unpleasant upbringing in an Irish-Catholic enclave in South Philadelphia. His mother was a heavy user of drugs and alcohol, and his stepfather was abusive.
He grew up surrounded by black families and felt like an “outcast” at school. At age 13, he was introduced to neo-Nazi beliefs through his cousin, who had a mural of Hitler in his bedroom. The skinhead crew Meeink joined “justified all my fears,” he said.
At 17, after his gang kidnapped a man and nearly killed another, Meeink was arrested. While in prison serving a three-year sentence, he bonded with and befriended black inmates, beginning his journey out of his racist views and former life.
Edward Norton’s character in the 1998 movie American History X, Derek Vinyard, is based on Meeink’s experiences.
Meeink is now hoping to turn the full story of his life into a movie, which he believes would act as a sequel to American History X, and is in allegedly in talks with Oscar-nominated director Sam French.
