“People are so amazed that Judaism may have gotten to other parts of Africa besides Ethiopia,” said Milwaukee-native dancer–choreographer-teacher Adam McKinney. “I’m more amazed that Judaism ever got to Europe, given my experiences in Ghana.”
This past spring, McKinney — son of Harriet Schachter McKinney, executive director of the American Jewish Committee-Milwaukee Chapter — visited the small “House of Israel” Jewish community in Sefwi Wiawso, an area about a seven-hours’ drive from the capital city of Accra.
He originally was going to go to Ghana for a different reason, to teach at the University of Ghana through New York University’s Global Program, while his partner, Daniel Banks of NYU’s department of drama, worked on a “hip-hop theater” project in the same country.
But through Kulanu, an organization that, according to its Web site, is “dedicated to finding and assisting lost and dispersed remnants of the Jewish people,” McKinney learned of the House of Israel.
And McKinney decided he wanted to visit this community, both to do an oral history project with Banks that was funded by the U.S. embassy in Accra, but also for a personal reason.
“I wanted … to have an experience with a Jewish community of color, and I wanted to create a relationship with the community to create more family,” he told The Chronicle in a telephone interview from his New York home.
On three occasions, McKinney visited the community, which he estimated numbered about 150 people. All three were structured around the Sabbath, and one also was the community’s Passover seder.
The first Sabbath was “just to say hello and get to know the community and spend Shabbat,” McKinney said. He attended services at the community’s synagogue, named Tiferes Israel from the Iowa synagogue that donated prayer books.
It was also the weekend before Purim, and McKinney taught some Purim songs. “The young people sang those songs at every subsequent meeting to show us that they remembered them,” McKinney said.
About six weeks later, he returned to the community for Pesach, and saw “all the Pesach preparations.” The community has its own holiday traditions, which include killing a year-old male lamb.
Its matzah “is like mana,” McKinney said, a concoction of plantains and spices mashed and cooked inside a banana leaf. And when it held the seder in the synagogue, “everything was relayed orally; they had no haggadah,” he said.
Nevertheless, there were practices in common; the eating of matzah and maror before the meal; the four cups of wine. And there was also “singing and clapping,” McKinney said.
It was at this and the third meeting, during which his brother David also visited the community, that McKinney interviewed community members for the oral history project both at Sefwi Wiawso and at another area called Sefwi Sui.
McKinney said that the community members “know their ancestors kept Shabbat for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.” Nevertheless, it was only in 1976 that in this predominantly Christian country, a religious leader, originally a Muslim man, “had a vision that told him to come back to his ancestors’ [Jewish] ways.”
This was the birth of the House of Israel community, and it encountered some disapproval from their neighbors. McKinney said one young man told him that “if people know you are Jewish, they hate you.”
Nevertheless, Kulanu’s Web site reports, “The elders have grown their group to encompass several large families. Most members of this community are children and they are the first generation of Ghanaians (at least in recent times) to be raised Jewish.”
And McKinney said that he found “a greater sense of world-wide family” from his encounter with the Ghanaian Jews. “To be included in this community’s Shabbatot and seder gave me a sense of continual belonging.”
Moreover, “I know that if I would have had this information as a young person about this and other non-European Jewish communities, I think my life and the lives of people around me would have been different. I wouldn’t have been hit with the racism that comes along with being a Jew of color in the United States. I wouldn’t have been the only one people would have known about or the only family people would have known about.”
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