Challah and mashed bananas: Ugandan Jews celebrate Rosh Hashana

Ziporah Naisi began preparing Rosh Hashana dinner in her isolated village in the foothills of Mount Elgon Thursday evening. Greasing her hands with palm oil, she peeled the bananas for matooke – a staple Ugandan mashed vegetable paste – until midnight. “It was work which I love doing,” she says. “When you love doing it, it becomes easier.”

Ms. Naisi is a member of the Abayudaya – meaning “the Jews of Uganda” in the Luganda language – a century-old, 2,000-strong community of Black Africans who have adopted the Jewish faith. The wife of Rabbi Gershom Sizomu, Ms. Naisi was leading a brigade of women making enough food for the hundreds of worshippers who would soon fill her home to celebrate the Jewish new year.

As Friday wore on, the women baked challah, a traditional Jewish bread, in outdoor ovens. They sliced apples to dip in honey in hope of bringing sweetness to the coming months.

The unusual community was founded by Semei Kakungulu in 1919. After a conflict with British colonial administrators, he tore his Bible in half so that it contained only the Old Testament, circumcised his sons, and declared himself a Jew.

Mr. Kakungulu transcribed a list of rules for his convert followers to obey, based on the commandments laid out in the biblical text. Later, visiting Jews taught the Abayudaya to read Hebrew and to prepare food according to kosher dietary restrictions.

A happy new year

On Friday afternoon, teenage girls inflated blue and white balloons, reminiscent of the Israeli national flag, and strung silver garlands around the synagogue, giggling as they played catch with the decorations. By sunset, the strains of guitar music and drums could be heard, encouraging people to come and pray, as a light rain began to fall. Orange light filtered through the clouds.

“Rosh Hashana is the head of the year, or the beginning of the year,” Mr. Sizomu explains. “It is to call us back to ourselves; those who have left the community, to call us back to the community; those who have left family and obligations and responsibilities, to call us back to responsibility.”

Later in the celebrations, the shofar – a twisted length of ram’s horn – would be blown as a reminder of that call.

As Mr. Sizomu led the Friday evening service in a mix of English, Hebrew, and Luganda, congregants clapped and swayed in time with guitar music played by Joab Jonadab “J.J.” Keki, the rabbi’s elder brother, who sets Hebrew verses to traditional Ugandan melodies.

When Mr. Keki was a boy, dictator Idi Amin forbade Jewish practices. Mr. Keki vividly recalls eight years spent praying in rocky caves, celebrating holidays in secret, doing everything to avoid detection.

Even after General Amin fell in 1979, the Abayudaya continued to suffer discrimination. Mr. Keki says he was arrested and beaten by police when he tried to erect a synagogue atop the hill where many of the Abayudaya now reside.

“One of the weapons I used to convince the Jewish youth of 1979, to bring them together, was music,” Mr. Keki says. His voice is hoarse with age but still has a tenor’s vibrancy. “We’d be here, very poor, but those youth wouldn’t leave me. I used to promise them that one day we’d be well off. I wouldn’t just tell them, but put those words to music, and we would be singing and became so powerful. ... The music was saying, ‘Never, never give up.’”

That history of political suppression is equally significant for Mr. Sizomu, who says he knew the day General Amin’s rule ended that he would become a rabbi.

“He was overthrown on Passover, on which Jewish people celebrate freedom from Egypt. I saw that with my eyes, that we were redeemed from the regime of Idi Amin, who had forbidden Judaism,” he says. “I wanted to be religious.”

His father and grandfather had served as spiritual leaders of the Abayudaya before him. The rabbi was ordained by the Conservative Jewish movement in the United States in 2008, and then he spent a year studying in Israel.

The Abayudaya’s relationship with Israel has been difficult – Israel’s Ministry of the Interior does not recognize the Abayudaya’s members as Jews, which means they are denied the right to immigrate. But a steady stream of international guests has flowed in and out of the Mbale hills, funding a permanent synagogue where the Abayudaya now pray, plus other construction. The community runs a health clinic and two schools where children can learn Hebrew.

Sharing food and customs 

Since Friday night also marked the beginning of Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest, Mr. Sizomu invited anyone who didn’t have enough to eat to share a meal at his home and any visitor who didn’t have a bed to sleep there.

Breaking bread together is particularly important for the Abayudaya. Biblical descriptions of famine resonate strongly on their hillside farms, where sparse rainfall caused many crops to wither this year.

Gathered around the rabbi’s table, members of the Abayudaya tore into the challah Ms. Naisi had prepared and passed around cups of sweet wine, filling their plates with matooke and cuts of kosher beef, the meat a special privilege in honor of the occasion.

It is not easy to provide food respecting Jewish law, says Ms. Naisi. “When you are in America you get access to kosher shops, in Israel … everything is there,” she says. “But here you have to pay attention.”

On Saturday morning more than two hundred people crowded into the synagogue, pulling up plastic chairs when there was no more room on the benches. Most were dressed in white, symbolizing purity; the men wore hand-knitted kippot, or head coverings, emblazoned with Stars of David. Children played between the rows of seats, as blessings and Torah readings stretched on for four hours.

Afterward, there was more food to share, eaten under the shade of spreading trees. 

This generosity extends to people of other faiths who live on the Mbale slopes.

“Outside this gate, not all the houses have Jewish families. One house is Jewish, another is Muslim, Christian. We are all the same but different,” says Susan Nambozo, pointing across the fence that encloses the synagogue.

The gate is often left open so that anyone who needs to fetch water from the Abayudaya borehole can come and take it.

The next generation

The community itself is maintaining its ranks, sometimes attracting new members; a group of converts from northern Uganda has joined. Another group of Jews lives in Kampala, Uganda’s capital city. 

Shmuel Mugisha serves as leader of the Kampala contingent of Abayudaya, encouraging them to keep Shabbat and honor old customs in a country where they are a small and often poor minority.

“We face the challenge of assimilation,” he says.

For Mr. Sizomu, who knows firsthand the harassment his community has suffered in the past, Rosh Hashana symbolizes the hope that future generations will carry on Jewish traditions. 

“In Judaism, we have a saying: L’dor V’dor – from one generation to the other,” he says. “There is nothing that can make a parent like me happier than seeing my children and grandchildren take on what I took on from my parents and my grandparents.”