What Would Help?
J.J., Rachel and Gershom are the only ones from the Abayudaya villages to travel to America to speak about their community.
This month-long trip marks J.J.'s fourth time in the United States and Rachel's second, but neither has been to Detroit before. Each American visit has been sponsored by the IJCR.
“We need to come to America to tell people about our need for electricity and running water for our six villages and for our schools,” J.J. said. “Right now, only our major synagogue has electricity and every day, we wait in line to pump water from a bore hole in the ground to take back to our families. My wife, Miriam, and I have nine children and 15 adopted children. Rachel, who is 23, is the oldest.”
The Abayudaya community has one high school, but it is too far from home for many potential students to attend.
“We want to build a dormitory so more students can come from other villages,” J.J. said. “We have books that have come from donations and are in different synagogues, but we need a library, to sit and study.”
On this trip, they have visited Washington, Baltimore, New York and Los Angeles, where members of a synagogue donated funds to help the Abayudaya high school build a science lab.
In Los Angeles, they also visited Gershom, the spiritual leader of the Abayudaya, who is a second-year student at the University of Judaism's Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies in Los Angeles.
“Gershom is the first person from our village to go to rabbinical school,” said J.J., whose other brother, Aaron Kintu Moses, is acting rabbi of the community and head of Hadassah Infant School, the Abayudaya elementary school.
“He did not go to rabbinical school, but he is very educated,” said J.J., whose father and grandfather also were rabbis without formal rabbinic education.
“After my ordination, I hope to serve my community and other emerging communities in Africa as a rabbi,” Sizomu said. “I hope to start a yeshivah in Uganda that will help prepare new African Jewish religious leaders to cater for the numerous congregations springing up on the continent.”
Speaking And Singing
The Kekis came to America primarily to speak at the third annual Bechol Lashon conference in San Francisco, an initiative of the IJCR.
“Bechol Lashon [In Every Tongue] is devoted to racial and ethnic diversity of Jews throughout the world,” said Dr. Gary A. Tobin, president of the IJCR, which serves as an international think tank providing policy research to the Jewish and general communities.
“The conference brings together leaders from Jewish communities around the world,” he said. “Our goal is to work with the ancient and emerging Jewish communities, some of which have historic Jewish roots and some, like the Abayudaya, who are relatively new.”
Bechol Lashon is overseen by Diane Tobin, IJCR associate director.
In San Francisco, J.J. and Rachel also performed African-Jewish music, as did Gershom and his wife, Tziporah, at a concert that celebrated Jewish diversity and honored Black History Month. Rabbi Baruch Yehuda, spiritual leader of an all-black synagogue in New York, also appeared.
“We believe in embracing diversity and growth as a way of avoiding disappearance,” Dr. Tobin said. “What if Gershom and J.J.'s father and grandfather were told, ‘No, you can't be Jewish?'
“We are eager for North American Jews to understand emerging Jewish communities around the world, hidden or lost — and there are more. We have a responsibility to help those in Africa who want to return to their Jewish roots or to become part of the Jewish people.”
To that end, the IJCR has sponsored trips to the U.S. so J.J. and Rachel can make others aware of their lives and their needs. The IJCR along with the University of Judaism also has provided a fellowship for Gershom to study and for his family to live in California for the five years of his schooling.
“We know he will go back with a hope to open the first Pan-African yeshivah to train rabbis in Africa,” Dr. Tobin said.
The IJCR recently established a philanthropic fund that is administered by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to fund-raise for a water and electricity project for the Abayudaya.
Life Of The Abayudaya
After speaking in Detroit, the Kekis go home to Mbale.
J.J. will return to his position as mayor of his village. A former chairman of the Abayudaya community, he is the first Jew to be elected to public office in Uganda.
He and Rachel will return to a life where most of the community of 714 Abayudaya work as subsistence farmers. Without electricity, there is no refrigeration, so they will continue their chore of gathering fresh food daily.
Like the Kekis, most of the Abayudaya keep kosher and each of the community's five synagogues has someone trained to slaughter animals according to Jewish law.
Shabbat is observed as it is in the United States. Most attend Shabbat services on both Friday evenings and Shabbat mornings, with many walking miles to avoid using transportation on Shabbat. Services may be held in Luganda alone or with Hebrew and English added. In one synagogue, services are solemn, with the congregation removing their shoes once inside.
“They follow what the Torah said that Moses was commanded to take off his shoes at the burning bush,” J.J. said. “So they take off their shoes in any holy place.”
Another is an Orthodox synagogue founded after an Orthodox American rabbi came to Uganda sharing the Orthodox observance of Judaism and bringing Orthodox prayer books.
“But we don't think of them as being separate,” J.J. said. “We are all Jewish together.”
The community has built an elementary school and a high school.
“Our Jewish children are now allowed to go to community schools without being baptized, but only in our schools would they be able to have Hebrew and Judaic studies,” J.J. said. “We have 200 students in our elementary school and more than 300 in our high school, but all of them are not Jewish. We invite everyone.”
Even in a remote area of the world, Ugandan Jews have been victims of anti-Semitism, with children sometimes teased and beaten by peers. “People who are not Jewish say we are ‘Jesus killers,'” J.J. said. “But they learn from us that that is not true. We teach them about Judaism.”
Rachel will return home with him. She serves on the Abayudaya Jewish community's executive council.
But there is more in store for Rachel. “She is interested in studying at an American university,” Dr. Tobin said. “The Institute will help her with the application process.”
And for Rachel there also is music.
Sounds Of Music
A completely unexpected experience has come from Western involvement with the Abayudaya — an astonishing musical success.
Two CDs of African melodies emerged from a village with only two old, worn and chipped guitars. Composed of both original lyrics and traditional Jewish liturgy in English, Hebrew and local languages including Luganda and Swahili, one of them was nominated for a 2005 American Grammy Award.
The musical recordings began when the delegation from Kulanu visited in 1995. They were so impressed with the music that they returned and produced the CD, Shalom Everybody Everywhere. It features Gershom's original music and the Abayudaya's Kohavim Tikvah choir, which included J.J. and Rachel, a soloist, then only 9 years old.
“Kulanu put us on the Internet and they are selling our CD [at its Web site] for a fund-raiser for the Abayudaya,” J.J. said.
It was the second CD, Abayudaya: Music from Jewish People of Uganda (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, Washington D.C., available at amazon.com), that brought the Grammy nomination in the category of Best Traditional World Music Album — Vocal or Instrumental.
“To make the CD, Rabbi Jeffrey Summit from Tufts University near Boston traveled to us with his recording machines and produced the CD,” J.J. said. “We sang and he recorded.”
Rabbi Summit, executive director and CEO of the Tufts Hillel Foundation and Tufts' Jewish chaplain, is an ethnomusicologist who teaches in the school's Judaic studies program and department of music.
Rabbi Summit has conducted research on music and liturgy of the Abayudaya. He also annotated a music CD that accompanies Abayudaya: The Jews of Uganda, whose text and photographs were created by Richard Sobol (Abbeville Press, N.Y.). Both have visited Mbale.
A third CD is in the works, this time with L.A.-based Gershom as the producer.
“Something else we want to have in our villages is musical instruments,” J.J. said. “Our young people love music. If they could learn to play instruments, they could have jobs as musicians.”
The Right Thing To Do?
While J.J. and his community are in awe of what has been accomplished by and for his people, Meyer sometimes second guesses his promise to tell the world about the Abayudaya.
“I think, indirectly, what I did has led to some amazing and good things for the community in terms of substantively addressing their basic community needs,” he said. “But I regularly wonder if it did not lead in some way to what may be their destruction.”
Meyer still returns to visit the Abayudaya every year or two, often for a Shabbat or Jewish holiday.
“I consider myself extremely lucky simply to observe what I have observed, to serve witness to a community that has so blossomed and yet been so destroyed. I, myself, am never quite sure which.”
After their initial visit to Uganda, Meyer and his travel partner, Julia Chamovitz, who also has made return visits to the Abayudaya, discussed at length the decision of how much to share with the outside world about their discovery.
“We spoke of everything, of how this community wanted us to do everything to help them: to promote awareness of their existence, to keep them safe, to help them build schools, to build a synagogue that was not built of mud and sticks,” Meyer said. “They had never had a permanent-structure synagogue before.
“And they wanted their children to be healthy. Disease was rampant. The AIDS scourge was just beginning to hit the community — which posed a particularly acute threat as the community had some success in practicing sexual exclusivity (only marrying within).”
He thinks of new risks that came with the notoriety of news media publicity and the Grammy nod.
“The most incredible thing may be the amazement and interest with which American Jewish audiences find them,” Meyer said. “Because that amazement and interest is not too dissimilar from how the Abayudaya view us.
“The danger is that the community will disappear or assimilate to such a degree that they do not even exist anymore,” Meyer said. “The community today is as divided as it has ever been. Kids are healthy. Everyone goes to school. But their services today much more closely resemble what you would find in a Southfield synagogue than what you would have found at Moses Synagogue 12 years ago. And I question whether that is a good thing.”
The last time Meyer visited the synagogue was this past Yom Kippur, the same High Holiday that first brought him to the Abayudaya a dozen years before.
“The banana porridge at sundown tasted quite sweet,” he recalled.
But he has seen J.J and Rachel since that trip. Last Friday night, Feb. 25, Meyer had Shabbat dinner with them and a group of Americans, including their host Rabbi Darren Levine, who have all spent extended time living in the Abayudaya villages.
“We are generally less interested in helping the community get religious materials and electricity and dig bore holes and are more interested simply in engaging the community as friends, in challenging them to serve each other better and just try to learn something from them,” Meyer said.
He will definitely return to the Abayudaya villages and visit the way he and his dinner companions always do.
“Most who go visit the community stay in Mbale's finest hotel four miles from Nabugoye Hill,” he said. “We stay in the village, often on the dirt and concrete floors of their homes. And we could not imagine doing it any other way.”
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