How did a clandestine Jewish community in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro stay under the radar for so many decades?

Text and photos: Ari Greenspan

W

ith no kids at home for Pesach, I hesitantly floated the idea to my wife of going away for the holiday. No, I wasn’t talking about a five-star hotel on the Amalfi coast or a deluxe kosher resort in the Caribbean. This “vacation” would involve sleeping in shacks and navigating the muddy roads in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro. For some reason I can’t fathom but am still grateful for, my wife agreed to spend last Pesach in Arusha, Tanzania, together with a community of secret Yemenite Jews.

When I began toying with the idea of visiting our friend Yehudah Kahalani in his Tanzanian community over Pesach — Ari Zivotofsky and I had spent time with this fascinating leader of an underground Jewish community the year before — I knew it would take some convincing. Pesach is challenging enough without having to kasher a foreign kitchen in a country where there’s no hashgachah on anything. But Shari is more than a good sport and understood that while it wouldn’t be easy, the halachic adventure would be something to remember for the rest of our lives.

Under the Radar

If you’re knowledgeable about African geography, you probably associate the East African country of Tanzania with Mount Kilimanjaro — the world’s highest freestanding mountain, nomadic Maasai warriors with their bright red wraps, or the great Serengeti plains with its herds of elephants, lions, giraffes, and other wild game.

What you probably won’t imagine is that there is an authentic but essentially unknown Jewish community right there in Arusha, Tanzania — a kehillah concealed for years from mainstream Jewry, whose reemergence after having gone underground is due to a dedicated young attorney and university lecturer named Yehudah Amir Kahalani.

Yehudah Kahalani (his local Tanzanian name is Peres Parpaih) is fulfilling the deathbed promise he gave his father, a man well-versed in the Yemenite traditions of his ancestors, who charged Yehudah with a mission before he died in 2010: Keep this Jewish community alive.

But how did these Jews manage to stay under the radar for so many decades? It stared back in the 1880s, when a little-known community of Yemenite Jews crossed over the Gulf of Aden into East Africa in search of financial opportunity. According to Yehudah, his own Yemenite ancestors came to Arusha from the Tanzanian offshore island of Zanzibar, where they’d set themselves up as traders. And, hidden in the deep African hills, was their small synagogue.

Due to surrounding hostilities, these Jews kept a low profile, until the community finally scattered in the 1960s in response to aggressive missionary activity, religious persecutions, and anti-Israel sentiment that came on the heels of Tanzania’s independence from Britain. Many Jews left the country, and those who remained went underground with their Jewish identity.

The older generation kept in touch after they were dispersed, and some members never stopped practicing Judaism. But many younger people didn’t even know their parents and grandparents were Jewish. All they knew was that their family didn’t work on Saturday, they were vegetarian, and they were forbidden to eat meat at their friends’ homes.

And that’s how Yehudah Kahalani grew up as a secret religious Jew in Tanzania, and why I had a strong desire to see his minhagim on Pesach.