The Jewish community of Lusaka, and yes, there is one, moves in waves. There are several kinds of Jews here. The majority, these days, are those like me: transient, here for one, two, three years at most, working for NGOs, or an embassy, or some short term business. A few others were grew up abroad but have lived in Zambia for many years, like Dr. Bush, an older British physician who has lived in Lusaka for 37 years. Finally there are the few who were born here and who have lived here their entire lives. They are all that remains of the once thriving Jewish population of Zambia, they are lone storytellers and historians to speak of what once was.
Some parts of the story are the same as the Jews of many American cities. Go to any downtown area and you will find the oldest synagogue in that city. Look in the museums there, the history books, and you’ll see old black and white photos of blocks and blocks of Jewish shops on streets that are present day Hispanic or Asian markets. One of my favorite pictures in The Jews of Boston is a photo of a little chassid boy standing on the corner of Prince Street and Salem Street in the North End, in front of a Jewish book shop. I love that picture because today, that bookshop is my favorite Italian bakery.
It is no different in Lusaka. The synagogue is right in the heart of downtown, in a business district, in a place where nobody lives anymore, not even many Zambians. It’s the kind of downtown that’s a financial district, busy with businessmen, government officials and shoppers during the day. They walk hurriedly past the unassuming synagogue gates, completely unaware of what is inside. I think even if you told them it’s a synagogue, they wouldn’t really know what that means. When Zambians ask me what church I attend, and I say I’m Jewish, I get questions like:
-What day of the week do you attend your church?
-Which books of the bible do you use?
-When do you celebrate Christmas?
-You must be from Israel then?
I’m not sure how shocking my answers are to them.
But back to the shul neighborhood. It’s the kind of downtown that closes at night, and there’s nothing but men walking around who you wouldn’t want to meet after dark. These days, the shops are all Zambian and Indian owned, with a smattering of fast food restaurants. But years ago, when Lusaka was just a tiny city compared with the much larger and more important cities on the Copper Belt and down in Livingstone, there was a kosher butcher, and kosher restaurants, and a bookshop, and more. In fact the Lusaka congregation was not even the largest one in Zambia. There were many more Jews involved in the mining in the copper belt and several congregations for them. The dedication in the front cover of the Rosh Hashanah machzor I picked up this morning read “To The Ndola Hebrew Congregation from Samuel and Aviva Ron, Jerusalem, 1964.” Independence and nationalization put a good dent in the Zambian Jewish community. They left in droves- to South Africa, to Israel, to the States. The shuls closed. The torahs and siddurim were given away. The small Lusaka congregation is all that remains.
The shul building itself is very pretty. Recently restored, it is white, spacious, and airy, with heavy, carved wooden doors and magen davids above the entryways. The entry hallway is in the middle of the building. To the right is the sanctuary. To the left is the social hall. Only it’s not a social hall anymore, it’s rented out as a school. The sanctuary has become the all purpose room. There is a big, old fashioned, heavy wooden carved bima in the center of the sanctuary, with rows of wooden benches facing it on either side. Once upon a time they told me, the entire sanctuary would be filled with benches, in a U shape all around the bima. Now, half the room is empty. On Monday night, it served as our dining room as well.
I walked into a room with a few small groups of people milling about. There were several young people my age, all NGO workers, several of them I had already met around town in various settings. Most of the rest were middle aged to older gentlemen, all dressed in the Israeli style of white button down shirts with the top few buttons open, no tie. Some of them were indeed Israelis, others spoke with accents of England, South Africa, and that general British Empire manner.
I finally met Lilac, an energetic and talkative Indian-Israeli girl somewhere around my age, who I had been speaking with on the phone. She’s here with her husband who works for the railroads, she did most of the cooking for the dinner and she helps organize social events for the synagogue. Her dinner, by the way, was amazing and included some traditional Indian Jewish Rosh Hashanah foods, like this cut up soft root vegetable that looked like apples but was spiced with cardamom. Like all Jewish women, she cooked absolutely too much food, and there loads of leftovers, which were given out to us and to the guards outside to enjoy.
The service was about 22 people strong, or maybe not so strong. Getting back to those waves of Jews who come through, apparently we’re at a nadir. Several families who had been pillars of the shul community in the past few years just left a few months ago. Of the 22, I counted 7, including myself, who were newly arrived NGO people. Without us, it would have been even smaller.
Coming into this service, I knew that I had to approach it with an open mind. Beggars can’t be choosers, I felt lucky enough to have found a shul and a Rosh Hashanah service in Lusaka. But there is something so powerful about tradition, about memory, about routine and about all of those things connected with the high holidays. And it’s hard to experience that spirituality with a service lacking those pieces I have come to rely on. For instance, I hear Unetane Tokef, sung passionately by the chazzan, and I know Rosh Hashanah is here. I didn’t get that here, exactly, so it was a struggle for me, both in the evening and morning services. The machzor we used was that of Liberal and Progressive Judaism out of the UK. I was surprised, actually, with how much Hebrew there was written in it. But we didn’t make very good use of it. To me, it felt more like a meeting than a prayer service. We took turns going around the room, reading out loud, mostly in English.
Whether he volunteered or was just pushed into it, Dr. Bush has become the informal leader, the all-purpose guy, of the congregation- the chazzan, the shofar blower, the torah reader. I give him full credit and respect. He tried very hard and did a good job. But his tradition and my tradition are so different to begin with, that his interpretation of that made it even harder for me to follow it. I don’t mean for this to sound at all judgmental. But it seems that for him, all of his knowledge comes from what he learned as a child, in Hebrew school, and leading up to his Bar Mitzvah. He was certainly opening and welcome to what we wanted to do, if anybody wanted to read out loud in Hebrew, or add a melody to a paragraph. I tried, whenever it was my turn, to do that. But there was little singing overall in the service and for me, that’s one of the most powerful parts. There was no opportunity to read quietly to ourselves and thus, it felt to me, little room for reflection.
For the morning service, I was very curious to see what would happen with torah reading, because there didn’t seem to be anybody there who would know how to do it. They did, in fact, take the torah out of the ark. They opened it, they lay it on the table, called the first person up for the aliyah and then, Dr. Bush proceeded to read in English from the torah portion as it was written in the machzor. From the depths of my memory, from the women’s tefillah I attended back in Stamford, from the times I learned the trop, I began to read to myself, hear the melody in my head and chanted it quietly. My coworker Lonny, who was at the service too, noticed me chanting and leaned over excitedly. “Do you remember that?” he whispered. “I would much rather have you chant it than listen to Dr. Bush read it in English.”
Dr. Bush noticed me too. After the torah reading was done, he asked if I could, if I would like to, read the haftarah, and I said I’d give it a try. So without ever having looked at the portion, or practiced the trop, I chanted my way through the haftarah as best as I could remember the trop was supposed to be. I could hear Mr. Soifer, who came into our 6th grade classroom back at Bi- Cultural Day School to teach us the trop, singing in his gutteral voice, “mooooonaaaaach zakef.” It was a bit surreal to be standing there on the bima in a shul in Lusaka, trying to read a haftarah I didn’t know. The last time I read a haftarah at a service was probably 12 years ago. I guess you never know when those skills will prove important.
When it came time to blow shofar, Dr. Bush gave it his best effort. At first he could make no sound come out. As he kept trying, the sound improved. Back in his memory, he clearly knew that there was meant to be a tekiah, a shefarim, and a teruah. He was able to replicate the general sense of each one, in no particular order, although sometimes his teruahs, would die out prematurely. The usual series of 9 sounds at each portion of the mussaf service became something like 5.3. At one point though, he turned to me to ask me to clarify which sound was which, and what they should sound like. For the final set of 9, he did all 9 sounds, almost perfectly.
At the end of the service, I was filled with mixed emotions. On the one hand, I felt sad that it was nothing like a service I was used to, and that I needed to go home and daven myself, to try to make it a Rosh Hashanah I could identify with. But on the other hand, I felt happy to have met the Jews of Lusaka. I felt proud to have been able to read the haftarah, to have brought song to parts of the service that would not have had any, and to have reminded somebody how to blow shofar.
It also got me thinking a lot about communities. At home, back in the US, in the Northeast, in big cities, we are spoiled. To have so many Jews, to have strong communities, so know that the shul is there when we need it. Of course there are shuls that struggle with getting a minyan but in general, there are enough members of the community to fill the roles that need be filled. But here, every single Jew counts, I mean really counts. One person’s absence is felt by all, in numerous and untold ways. Somehow Judaism survives, but without that critical mass of knowledge and support, it’s easy to see how traditions are lost, changed and confused. At home, people have their choice, have the ability to find the type of Jewish community that fits them, because there are so many. Here, it’s either the one or nothing at all. And so it takes patience, and compromise, and putting aside of those age-old conflicts that separate orthodox from conservative from reform. It’s a reminder than in this country where we are not only a religious and cultural minority but an ethnic minority as well, we must set aside our difference and hold dear our common bonds.
So the tiny, transient, wave-like Jewish community of Lusaka pushes forward, losing and picking up pillars along the way, but always standing together, facing North (towards Jerusalem), in the little shul building on ChaChaCha Road.
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