Jerry Knoppow
stands at the
equator in
Uganda.

High-Tech Project

Grandfather and granddaughter work to keep
Ugandan Jews sustainably wired.

Stacy Gittleman

I Contributing Writer

t Hillel Day School in
Farmington Hills, all students
learn to click, drag and research
in fully wired media labs equipped to
educate in today's digital age. Far away,
in a remote village in eastern Uganda
containing a large percentage of the coun-
try's 2,000 Abayudaya Jews, the Hadassah
Primary School expects to open a com-
puter lab for its 800 Jewish, Christian and
Muslim students as early as February 2015
— thanks to the efforts of grandfather and
granddaughter duo Jerry Knoppow and
Miriam Saperstein.
The two went to Uganda on their
own and aim to create a bridge of cul-
tural understanding through the Internet
between the Hadassah school and fifth-
and sixth-graders at Hillel Day School.
This summer, Knoppow and Sapirstein
left the comforts of their West Bloomfield
and Huntington Woods homes and
spent a week with the Abayudaya Jews of
Nabagoya Hill in the village's guest house
and a second week touring the country.
In their suitcases, they packed not only
prayer shawls, tefillin and siddurim to bet-
ter connect their hosts to Judaism, but also
laptops fully loaded with the latest soft-
ware to connect them to the world.
For Saperstein, 16 and a student at

—

71

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Miriam Saperstein of Huntington Woods shows Ugandan Jews ways to use a laptop.

Berkeley High School, the visit offered a
hands-on exploration of a Jewish commu-
nity she knew little about until she discov-
ered them in a fifth-grade social studies
class at Hillel. The school continues to
teach about the Ugandan community on
both religious and cultural levels and last
year raised money for a clean drinking
water supply for the Hadassah school.
This trip is nearly a decade in the
making. In 2005, after learning about
the Abayudaya Jews through Kulanu, a
Baltimore-based organization involved

in research, education and donations to
those in developing Jewish communities,
Knoppow arranged for the leader of the
Abayudaya, J .J. Keki, to visit the Jewish
community of Detroit.
Keki, a convert to Judaism, visited
here for a week in March 2005 to teach
the Jewish community here the customs,
prayer melodies and other traditions of his
community back in Uganda.
Knoppow said the goal of their high-
tech project is not just to "pour in money
to get the school wired and fitted with

laptops and Internet connectivity and then
walk away" It is to help the villagers be
able to become financially independent to
sustain and update the technology.
He backed his passion for the project
with statistical evidence from the Bill
Gates Foundation, which shows that the
introduction of technology to rural com-
munities changes lives by motivating peo-
ple to pursue higher levels of education.
The long-term cost of establishing this
project is $40,000-$50,000, Knoppow
said. In the latest update, he plans to pack
six suitcases with additional laptops and
get them to New York by Nov. 11, where
leaders of the Ugandan community will
be putting on a benefit concert for subsis-
tence farmers.
For details on volunteering or making
a tax-deductible donation to this project,
or for those wishing to contribute through
upcoming b'nai mitzvah projects, go to
http://tinyurl.com/ok9rhxp or contact
Knoppow at jerry.knoppow@comcast.net .
As for Saperstein's take-away from the
experience, she knows that most of her
peers in suburban Detroit grow up in a
"privileged bubble" where there is a b'nai
mitzvah culture of short-term mitzvah
projects. At home, she admits she is happy
to be surrounded by creature comforts
while also dedicating many hours as a
PeerCorps volunteer at Detroit's James and
Grace Lee Boggs School.
After her visit to Uganda, she learned
what it means to enter another community
very different from her own with humility
and the capacity to listen.
"Any time you enter a community as
an outsider, you should not have precon-
ceived notions that you know what will be
best for them:' Saperstein said. "The Jews
in Uganda are not there for us to pity or
for us to feel good about ourselves by mak-
ing a monetary donation. We must work
together with them as a team to map out a
sustainable plan that will enable both the
teachers and students to compete globally"
The trip was not all about work. During
her stay, Saperstein also had fun "hanging
out" and making friends with her Ugandan
peers. A leader of teen discussions at B'nai
Israel Synagogue of West Bloomfield back
home, Saperstein felt honored to lead parts
of the Shabbat morning services in the vil-
lage's traditional egalitarian synagogue.
"Though they prayed in Hebrew and
their native Luganda language, I felt so
connected to the melodies and the words:'
Saperstein said. "I know I can go anywhere
in the world and know I can feel con-
nected to the rituals and prayers that unite
us as Jews. That is very powerful:'
Knoppow said, As I listened to my
granddaughter lead the prayers, I could
not see the words in my siddur from the
tears of joy in my eyes:'

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October 23 • 2014

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