Aaron Kintu Moses, headmaster of the primary school in the Abayudaya Jewish community of Uganda, said he was visiting the United States for the first time, and “I did not expect it to be so beautiful. I thought it was like a desert.”
Why? Because he saw American tourists in Uganda who wanted to see the lakes and rivers; and he thought it must be because there are no lakes and rivers in America, he said.
But lakes and rivers in the landscape are only a few of the things Kintu Moses found he had in common with America’s Jewish community. When he visited Milwaukee Jewish day schools, he said they “almost teach the same things” that Jewish schools in Uganda do.
However, the Ugandan schools do not teach these things to as many students. As Kintu Moses explained to an audience of about 50 meeting at Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun on Nov. 8, the Abayudaya today total 753 people — including now his one-month-old son, the youngest of his four children.
They are a tiny minority in a generally impoverished nation of some 26 million people. Yet the community manages to operate five synagogues and two schools, an elementary school with 200 students of whom 150 are Jewish, and a high school of 260 students of whom 70 are Jewish.
Still, in the rural and undeveloped areas in which the Jews live, these schools suffer from severe lacks of basic items, including textbooks — Kintu Moses said as many as five students have to share one book — to say nothing of computers and electricity to power them.
But the community struggles with what it has and with whatever help it can get from outside Jewish organizations. One of these is Kulanu, which is dedicated to finding and assisting small and dispersed Jewish communities like this.
Kulanu brought Kintu Moses to the United States; and he spoke in Milwaukee with the sponsorship of the American Jewish Committee-Milwaukee chapter.
One founder
Unlike the Jewish community of Ethiopia, whose origins are ancient and mysterious, the Abayudaya community is young, not quite one century old, and can trace its creation to one man.
At the turn of the 20th century, Uganda was a British protectorate, and many Christian missionaries were in the region. One of the missionaries’ students, a soldier named Semei Kakungulu, began to puzzle over what he perceived to be contradictions between the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible.
As Kintu Moses recounted the story, Semei Kakungulu asked the missionaries why they didn’t keep kosher or observe the Sabbath on Saturday, among other things, and they told him that it is not Christian but Jewish to do that.
Ultimately, Semei Kakungulu decided he wanted to become a Jew, an event that Kintu Moses said happened around 1919. Upon his death in 1928, Semei Kakungulu had established a solid community that at its peak included 3,000 people and 27 synagogues. It also had a relationship with Israel during the 1960s and received some books and other materials from the Israeli embassy.
However, anti-Israel dictator Idi Amin took power in 1971 and inaugurated a period of persecution of the Abayudaya. The government took over the synagogues, destroyed Jewish books, declared Friday and Sunday but not Saturday to be official rest days, and even arrested people for Jewish observance. The last group included Kintu Moses’ father, who was jailed for having built a sukkah, Kintu Moses said.
The fear drove some Abayudaya to convert to Islam or Christianity, which were officially recognized religions. Yet some persisted with Jewish observance in secret; and now that the present Ugandan government allows freedom of worship, speech and association, some of the former Jews are coming back, Kintu Moses said.
In fact, relations with the non-Jewish communities have improved greatly. Non-Jews attend the Jewish schools, and non-Jews have joined with Abayudaya in collaborative projects like the Mirembe Kawomera (“delicious peace”) coffee growing and marketing cooperative.
The Abayudaya community has also restored contact with world Jewry in several ways. A beit din (religious court) from the U.S. Conservative movement worked in the community in 2002; and today one community member is a rabbinical student in Los Angeles.
For more information about the Abayudaya, visit the Kulanu Web site, www.kulanu.org.
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