Photos by Richard Sobel.
Copyright Richard Sobel/Abbeville Press.
Mbale, where J.J.'s family still lives.
There, Kakungulu began a sect called
"the Community of Jews who trust in
the Lord." He began construction of
a synagogue that, upon his death, was
overtaken by Christian missionaries.
The group continued to be observant
Jews but, because of limited methods of
communication and travel, they
remained out of touch with other
Jewish communities. Only in the 1960s
were they able to reach out to the out-
side world.
"We even were visited by the first
Israeli ambassador to Kenya, Arye
Oded," J.J. said. "He wrote about us in
Hebrew and in English."
But soon after, in 1971, Idi Amin
came to power and outlawed Judaism in
Uganda and destroyed all the syna-
gogues.
"None of the children could go to
school unless they were baptized as
Christians," J.J. said. "So, many people
allowed their children to be baptized so
they were able to go school." Others
went underground, remaining true to
the Jewish tradition and educating their
children themselves.
Continuing On
In 1980, when Amin's dictatorship fell,
religious freedom was restored in
Uganda. The Abayudaya community
that once included 2,500 members with
seven synagogues was now a strong, but
much smaller group of 500 — and they
had no synagogue.
During the next 12 years, the com-
munity was re-established under the
leadership of three brothers: Joshua
Jacob "J.J." Keki, Aaron Kintu Moses
and Gershom Sizomu. (In Ugandan tra-
dition, blood siblings did not share a
common family name, although in
more modern times, J.J.'s children have
his name of Keki.)
Calling themselves "the kibbutz
movement," the Aba udaya lived in a
kibbutz-like environment. They
reclaimed the hill lost after Kakungulu's
death and built the synagogue he began,
c alling it the Moses Synagogue.
In 1992, Matthew Meyer, then a 21
year old junior from Brown University
studying in Kenya, introduced the
world to the Abayudaya community.
"I attended Yom Kippur services in
Nairobi with Julia Chamovitz, a peer of
mine from Pittsburgh on my study
abroad program," said Meyer, a Bay
City, Mich., native raised in Delaware.
"I sat next to the one black African in
the synagogue," Meyer said. "Julia —
who was sitting in the women's section
— encouraged me to talk to the guy,
.
y
_
-
-
_
14,
Zlri Kotula teaches the weekly
Torah portion outside the Putti'
Synagtigue;'ighlth is the smallest
of the Abayudaya .synagogues --
and has no back wag
find out what was up. I did, and that
set me off on a pretty amazing journey."
"Matt had been watching Gershom
following the prayers in Hebrew," J.J.
said of the chance meeting with his
brother. "He asked him if he was Jewish
and Gershom told him eyes' and invited
him to come to our village for Shabbat.
When he left, he promised to tell every-
one of the Jews of Uganda."
Telling America
Armed with photos and tapes of
Abayudaya music, Meyer spent months
trying to spur American interest in the
community, even creating a Web site
about them.
"I spent many college nights writing
letters about my Ugandan friends with
-
little or no response," Meyer said. "I sent
out, over the course of a month, about
40 or 50 letters about the community,
many including tapes of their music."
It was six months before someone
contacted him.
"My letter somehow landed on the
desk of a rabbinic student researching
dispersed Jewish communities," he said.
"A few months later, a rabbi called me
because he had gotten his hands on the
cassette and their music amazed him.
"From those two contacts, next thing
we knew, there were Shabbat visitors on
Nabugoye Hill [where the Moses
Synagogue is located] nearly every week
and national news stories. A rabbi who
visited expressed his disbelief at having
spent a week in an African village with a
community he said he often thought
was as Jewish as his own family"'
Finally, Americans were responding
with visits and gifts, including a new
Torah and money from the Brown
University Hillel in Providence, R.I., to
help build a synagogue. Others visited,
coming to teach and donate resources
and prayer books.
Within a couple of years, Meyer
went back to visit the Abayudaya vil-
lages.
"I returned after college with a grant
and, along with a Kenyan peer, started a
small sandal-making cooperative that
has done quite well at Ecosandals.com ,"
Meyer said. The project was created to
provide work and income for impover-
ished residents of Korogocho in Kenya.
The work earned Meyer the Samuel
S. Beard Award for the Greatest Public
Service by an Individual 35 Years or
Under. He is the recipient of the
American Institute for Public Service
Jefferson Award for excellence in public
service.
Meyer's ties with the Abayudaya
community remain strong.
"In Nairobi, all East Africans have
what they call a `ushago,' a rural home-
stead where they go for holidays and
when they get enough bus fare to go
home," he said. "For a year, I treated
Mbale, Uganda, as my ushago. To some
extent, I still do. On Nabugoye Hill, it
is so green and scenic and peaceful. I
once saw a rainbow in the sky there that
was a complete ring."
Meyer. a graduate of the University
of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor,
now lives and works as an attorney in
New York.
Visiting Groups
Soon after Meyer's trip to Uganda, a
group of Conservative rabbis from Israel
and the United States traveled to the
Abayudaya villages to perform a mass
conversion for the group who for so
long had been living as Jews.
J.J. attended the ceremony, but said,
"I don't like to think of myself as a con-
verted person. I was a Jew already. I was
raised by Jewish parents, and I always
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