“Unsafe water kills more people than war.” When I first heard this statement, I was caught off guard. In 2017, really? I come from Israel, a country troubled by both lack of water and war, and somehow I had never heard this. How could this be? Hundreds and millions of people live in Africa without…
(JTA) — David Steiner, a documentary filmmaker from Chicago who was studying to be a rabbi, was killed in a bus crash in rural Uganda. Steiner, 51, the creator of the award-winning documentary “Saving Barbara Sizemore,” about efforts to save a charter school in Chicago, was the only fatality in Monday’s crash. His son, Itamar, and…
As Jews around the world celebrate the restarting of the Torah, among them is probably the world’s newest, and unlikeliest, group of Jews. The Abayudaya are converts twice over – once converted to Christianity by British missionaries in the late 1800s and again to Judaism in the early 1900s when their leader, inspired by the…
Jewish life is thriving in Africa. That’s what British-American photographer Jono David discovered during a four-year journey accross the continent. David set out to document the Jewish landscape of Africa, from dwindling European enclaves in South Africa to the isolated Egyptian Jewish community — to the unprecedented blossoming of Judaism among Sub-Saharan Africans. “My goal…
A Jewish community in Africa has moved one step closer to gaining formal recognition from the Israeli government. The Jewish Agency said in a letter to Israel’s Conservative movement that the Abayudaya Jews of Uganda, a community whose members formally converted to Judaism under Conservative auspices, are a “recognized” community, Haaretz reported Tuesday. Such recognition…
Far from political discussions about Bernie Sanders and the meaning of secular Jewish socialism, Jewish political history has just been made — in Uganda. An African Jew, and chief rabbi, no less, has just won a parliamentary seat, a first for the country. On February 19, Rabbi Gershom Sizomu, the spiritual leader of the century-old…
“Delicious Peace,” a CD of original Ugandan songs produced by the longtime Hillel director at Tufts University, won best world traditional album at the Independent Music Awards. The CD produced by Rabbi Jeffrey Summit, an ethnomusicologist and a research professor of music at the Boston-area school, features songs about coffee and religious unity. The 13th…
Getty Images Freedom is always a primary theme on Passover, but this year, after travelling in Uganda for ten days as part of the American Jewish World Service (AJWS) Global Justice Fellowship, the idea is heavy with real-world implications. The Haggadah instructs: “In every generation, everyone must think of him or herself as having personally…
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