Gray is
African-American and was born to a Baptist working-class family in the
Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago. She is a relative of baseball player
Lorenzo Gray. Each summer, she and her siblings visited her
sharecropper grandparents in
Mound Bayou, Mississippi. After college, Gray worked for 23 years for
Continental Airlines, working first as a
flight attendant and later becoming an executive. she completed conversion through the Jerusalem
beth din to become an Orthodox Jew. In Israel, Gray has worked as a tour guide, and as a lecturer abroad. Gray has lived in
Bayit VeGan, Jerusalem since the mid-1990s. She identified as
Haredi. == Personal life ==