In new Jewish music these days there's klezmer, there's folksy stuff, there's some pop. And then there's Joshua Nelson.

This observant young black Jew from Newark, N.J., puts his soaring tenor to Negro spirituals and Jewish songs he arranges as spirituals, in the process coming up with something unique.

He calls it "kosher gospel." Rapidly growing numbers who are hearing Nelson sing in venues from synagogues to concert halls -- he'll be singing at the Downtown Seder this week -- call his melding of African-American musical forms and Jewish content inspiring.

Nelson, 28, has appeared on "Oprah," and performed for ambassadors and heads of state. He cuts an imposing presence; he's tall and resplendent on stage in gold-embroidered robes that match his large yarmulke.

He grew up in a Jewish family where kashrut and Shabbat were observed and holidays celebrated, though with a few of the customs unique to the Black Hebrew community of which the Nelsons were a part at the time. Passover was a celebration of the new Jewish year, for example, and everyone in the synagogue would dress in white for the occasion.

Nelson traces his Jewish ancestry back generations to Africa. It has been an unbroken line through the women in his family, he said in an interview backstage just before he and a small choir performed at The Liberation Seder at the Manhattan JCC last week.

He can trace his interest in music to when he was 8 and played a Mahalia Jackson record at his grandmother's house. He was hooked.

Nelson began singing in the synagogue his family attended. Word quickly spread; soon he was singing at local churches and synagogues.

Nelson was 15 and a student at the High School of Performing Arts in Newark when he was invited to sing at the funeral for jazz singer Sarah Vaughn, who had attended the school decades earlier. That led to an appearance at the JVC Jazz Festival, and he was launched.

As a young child, Nelson-s family would trek into Brooklyn to celebrate Jewish holidays at a Black Hebrew congregation. But they soon joined a synagogue closer to home, the Reform Congregation Sharey Tefilo-Israel in South Orange.

The Sharey Tefilo family welcomed Nelson's, the only black one around. But Nelson's observance and religious appearance -- he'd wear a black suit, with a yarmulke and his tzitzit visible -- was as distinctive there as the color of his skin.

"People asked us questions, they were curious, but they were also very welcoming," he said.

Nelson recalls being shocked when he visited a friend's house and they offered him a ham sandwich.

He had a harder time at the High School of Performing Arts, where Nelson said the other black teens considered him suspect. Some said he must have been rich if he was Jewish; others called him "pad head." This was the era of big shoulder pads, and someone decided that his yarmulke looked like a shoulder pad.

"I saw myself as black and Jewish, and they just saw me as Jewish," Nelson said.

Nelson usually regards the confluence of his cultures as a blessing, but it proved troublesome at times, too. Following the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, New Jersey poet laureate Amiri Baraka wrote a poem suggesting that Israel was behind the calamity and that Jews weren't in the towers that day. Baraka was immediately and widely, though not universally, criticized.

Baraka called Nelson at home, presumably looking for his support. Nelson hung up on him.

"I didn't want to talk to him," he said.

Throughout high school and since, Nelson has maintained his observance. Every morning before school he would take the bus from Newark to Livingston to attend morning minyan at Temple Beth Sholom.

"Everybody loved him," said Rabbi Azriel Fellner, who remembers Nelson well from those years at the Conservative congregation. "He's a very lovely young man."

Now Nelson attends an Orthodox Sephardic minyan in East Orange every morning he can.

So how does this Gospel music-loving, Jewishly observant singer reconcile his religious beliefs and his church performances?

"I just omit the Jesus songs," he said. "A lot of spirituals are based in Bible."

Nelson finds plenty to sing about that doesn't refer to Jesus as the Lord.

"The churches know me and respect me," he said.

Nelson has rejected invitations from "messianic" and Evangelical congregations.

"I won't sing anywhere they have trouble with me being Jewish," he said.

Nelson still works as the music director at the Hopewell Baptist Church in Newark. He also teaches the pre-bar and bat-mitzvah students at Sharey Tefilo.

In general, but especially in his teaching role there, Nelson regards himself as a Jew with a mission.

"My goal is to invigorate young people who don't want to come back after their bar and bat mitzvahs," he said. "So I teach them my 'Mi Chamocha' with a Motown twist. I put my li'l vamp on it."

"You can preach that they should come to temple, but you gotta have something there for them to come back to."

While his several CDs to date have all been adult-oriented -- his latest is "Brother Moses Smote the Water" with the Klezmatics -- Nelson is planning a recording for young people.

"I want to create a whole revolution for young people," he said. "They should have no excuses not to come."