Representatives of Jewish communities in Sub-Saharan Africa gathered last weekend in Ivory Coast to create an umbrella religious organisation for the region.
During a week of activities in Abidjan, the attendees learnt about Jewish practices, such as “kosher” slaughter and burial practices.
“The purpose of this meeting is to bring together all of the emerging Jewish communities that are developing and growing throughout Africa. For example, Nigeria has over 80 orthodox synagogues and it’s growing. And we find this in many countries across Africa. They’ve never met each other. (…) We spent a week together learning and studying the Bible, the Torah, the Jewish traditions and the Jewish law”, explained Arieh Greenspan, co-organizer of the conference.
The event was organized by a Jewish non-profit organization, Kulanu, with the aim of reuniting emerging Jewish communities in Africa.
“They understand that Judaism in Sub-Saharan Africa is sometimes a new phenomenon. Though some believe they are descendants of lost tribes or Israelite tribes in the Bible. Some have found Judaism new. And this group of combined people are practising Judaism, living Jewish lives, and for the first time ever got together to create an alliance”, added Bonita Sussman, known as Rabbanit, president of Kulanu.
On the final day, ahead of the Hannukah celebrations, the group planned to consecrate a new synagogue with the laying of a cornerstone.
Rabbi Sussman teaching in Antananarivo, Madagascar
Imagine taking a trip on one of those huge luxurious cruise ships unbeknownst to you the course is altered by a few degrees. While you are traveling everything seems the same except that because of this seemingly small course alteration the ship will end up arriving at a destination completely different from the one you expected.
Right now an important and I believe decisive development is taking place which, while at this moment mostly unnoticed, will with time transform the Jewish faith and people from the tiny and often embattled minority that we are, to a truly international people with numerous adherents in every corner of the globe.
All the headlines about antisemitism have obscured the fact that all over the world people are turning toward Judaism. New Jewish communities are emerging in Africa which proclaim descent from the Lost Tribes or who have found that their search for religious truth has led them to Judaism.
In Latin America, numerous communities are springing up being founded by Crypto Jews who no longer want to keep their Jewish ancestry a secret but publicly embrace their Jewish roots and openly practice Judaism and are rejected by the Jewish establishment.
The same phenomenon is also found to some extent in India and to a limited extent in Europe. Even in the United States there are Christian backgrounds who are seriously exploring Judaism.
In the coming months, I hope to introduce you to specific emerging communities, their histories, practices and the issues they face. To name a few there are the 30 million plus Ibos in Nigeria and the two mllion Danites in the Ivory Coast, the B’nai Ephraim of South East India, or the Gogodalas of Papua New Guinea who claim that the Ark and the staff of Moses lie under the water of the Fly River lagoon. I also want to introduce you to some of the academic study who of these groups.
Will these new communities lead to a different definition of Judaism? Does racism play a role in their acceptance? Are Jews a race? Does the field of Jewish genetics play a role? What role does socio-economics play? What would be the consequences of the new communities coming to comprise the majority of the Jewish people?
I first became interested in the subject back in 2007, when my wife and I attended a conference at the Academy For Jewish Religion where my wife taught. We met a leader of the Abayudaya community of Uganda and offered to volunteer. We ended up volunteering for the Bnai Ephraim community in India, It was a life-changing experience. Since then I’ve been to Cameroon, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, and Nicaragua as a volunteer for Kulanu, an organization which supports emerging, returning and isolated communities around the globe and of which my wife Bonita now serves as president.
If these issues excite you please become a regular reader and share.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rabbi Gerald Sussman serves as the coordinator of the Rabbinic Ambassador program of Kulanu and has traveled extensively to meet emerging Jewish communities around the globe. He lives on Staten Island and serves as rabbi of Congregation Temple Emanuel-El, Staten Island. He is also a founding member of the Union for Traditional Judaism and on the Board of Governors of the New York Board of Rabbis.
We are excited to announce a wonderful new issue of Kulanu’s magazine. The Fall 2022 issue (volume 29, no 2) is available in full color online.
Simply follow this link or click on the cover below to explore stories on diverse topics including…
How “Mama Harriet” Changed the World
Jewish Weddings Around the World
“Harriet Believed in All of Us”
and more!
Thanks to Judi Kloper, our editor, and Lisa Yagoda, our photo and layout editor, and to all the authors and photographers for another fascinating issue!
Harriet Bograd in 2011 at a Jewish-themed primary school in Uganda that is open to Christians and Muslims. She was for many years the president of Kulanu, an organization that supports Jewish communities in places where even most American Jews don’t realize there are Jews. (Credit – Barbara Vinick, via Kulanu)
By Joseph Berger Published Nov. 23, 2022
In the summer of 2001, Harriet Bograd decided to visit her daughter Margie, who had taken a summer job in a remote village in Ghana.
When Ms. Bograd and her husband, Ken Klein, arrived in the village, Sefwi Wiawso, they learned about its community of two dozen families who considered themselves Jewish, even if the religious authorities in Israel and elsewhere did not.
In the week she was there, Ms. Bograd, whose husband called her “one of life’s great enthusiasts,” turned her enchantment with the villagers into a practical project that has become a major source of income for the community. She guided artisans in fashioning the colorful kente cloth sold in the local market into covers for the braided challahs that observant Jews bless and eat during Sabbath and holiday meals. A trained lawyer, she set the community up as an incorporated business that sold the challah covers across the United States for $36 apiece. Thousands have been purchased.
In the years after that trip, Ms. Bograd worked with the nonprofit organization Kulanu, which supports “isolated, emerging or returning” Jewish communities in places where even most American Jews don’t realize there are Jews: Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Cameroon, Madagascar, Indonesia, Pakistan, Guatemala, the Philippines and more — 33 countries in total.
These are people who for generations have kept some fundamental Jewish laws, like resting on the Sabbath and abstaining from certain foods, but who may have had only opaque ideas of their community’s Jewish origins.
Ms. Bograd with her husband, Ken Klein, on a trip to Ghana in 2001. Her experience there motivated her to join Kulanu. (Credi – Joseph Kwame Nipah, via Kulanu)
They trace their Jewish roots to a variety of sources: the 10 lost tribes that were dispersed by the Assyrian conquest of the Kingdom of Israel in 722 B.C.E.; the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions, which, starting in the late 15th century, scattered thousands of Jews in far-off lands, where many practiced their religion in secret; and the century-old conversions by communal leaders more attracted to the Old Testament than the teachings of Christian missionaries.
“It gave her such joy that these Jewish people felt they were connected to the greater Jewish world and felt they belonged,” Mollie Levine, the deputy director of Kulanu, said in an interview.
Ms. Bograd died on Sept. 17 in a Manhattan hospital. She was 79. Her daughter Rabbi Margie Klein Ronkin said the cause was complications of heart surgery.
So exhilarated was Ms. Bograd by her experience in Ghana that she promptly joined the board of Kulanu. By her death, she had served as its president for 14 years. The organization’s headquarters were in the study of her Upper West Side apartment.
Under her command, the organization, whose Hebrew name means “all of us,” raised funds to build synagogues in Uganda and Zimbabwe; a Jewish-themed primary school in Uganda that is open to Christians and Muslims; and a mikvah — a ritual bath — in Tanzania. With a budget of around $500,000, Kulanu has also provided rabbinical training and advanced classes in Judaism at American seminaries for community leaders and distributed prayer books, Torah scrolls, prayer shawls and other ritual items.
Kulanu’s work has not been without controversy. While Jews in Ethiopia have been recognized by the Orthodox authorities in Israel as authentically Jewish, those in other parts of Africa have not been. Efforts by Conservative rabbis to formally convert some Africans to Judaism have encountered challenges because the Orthodox establishment in Israel does not recognize the legitimacy of Conservative rabbis. Bonita Nathan Sussman, Kulanu’s new president, said that many Africans also reject conversion, arguing, “Who are you to tell me I’m not Jewish?”
On the other hand, Ms. Levine said, Ms. Bograd “met them at the level where they are.”
She was active in Jewish causes in New York as well. In the early 1980s, she and other parents partnered with educators to found the Heschel School, a Jewish day school in Manhattan that now enrolls about a thousand students. And at the West End Synagogue, a Reconstructionist congregation, she was known for the warm way she greeted newcomers, an act congregants affectionately called “Bograding.”
Harriet Mary Bograd was born on April 6, 1943, into a Conservative Jewish home in Paterson, N.J. Her father, Samuel Bograd, owned an upscale furniture emporium with an uncle. Her mother, Pauline (Klemes) Bograd, sometimes helped her husband with his business and was a leader in a local chapter of Planned Parenthood.
Harriet attended a special high school operated by Montclair State Teachers College (now Montclair State University) and graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1963 with a degree in political science. The summer she graduated, she arranged for a group of nine white Bryn Mawr students to teach at Livingstone College, a historically Black college in Salisbury, N.C., so that they could absorb the impact of the growing civil rights movement.
A 1963 yearbook photo of Ms. Bograd. She graduated from Bryn Mawr that year and went on to Yale Law School. (Credit – Special Collections, Bryn Mawr College Libraries)
One of 11 women in her class at Yale Law School, she graduated in 1966. Rather then joining a law firm, she went to work for an organization in New Haven, Conn., that represented indigent clients in matters like access to medical care and that trained local residents to be advocates for themselves and their neighbors.
She helped start a day care center in New Haven, joined with other parents and teachers in a drive to improve local public schools, and campaigned for the government to approach drug addiction as a crisis of health and poverty rather than a crime.
She married Mr. Klein, a tax lawyer, in 1977. In addition to her daughter Rabbi Klein Ronkin, he survives her, as do another daughter, Sarah Klein; a sister, Naomi Robbins; and two grandchildren.
When Ms. Bograd received a diagnosis of Stage 4 breast cancer in 1997 with a bleak prognosis, it made her only more determined to use her remaining time for the Hebrew concept of tikkun olam — “repairing the world” — and for her work with Kulanu.
Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, said Ms. Bograd had also seen Kulanu as a vehicle to expand the mainstream Jewish sense of what Jews are supposed to look like.
“She felt it enhanced American Judaism to recognize that all Jews are not white and European,” he said.
Joseph Berger was a reporter and editor at The New York Times for 30 years. He is the author of a biography of Elie Wiesel, which is scheduled for publication in February.
