the red pen

The two subscribers to the World Jewish Digest who also read a la deriva won't be getting their December copies for another few weeks... but when you do, please note that the Uganda brief that has my name on it meant to read like below. The other readers of my blog should save themselves the trouble and not bother to subscribe:

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Much to the dismay of the people standing in the back of the room, those who were lucky enough to find seats kept filtering in and out of the back door to the bathroom down the hall. At the front of the room stood Aaron Kintu Moses, director of education and acting spiritual leader of the Abayudaya, or Jewish, community in Uganda. He was proudly discussing the new water tanks that held, for most of the residents, their first taste of running water.

The sounds of screaming children wafting through the open door from the middle school Halloween dance down the hall did not facilitate a perfect understanding of Moses’ strongly accented English, but the photos circulating around the room—of children excitedly using the new spigot to wash their hands—filled in the blanks. Moses, clad in a green dress shirt, a red tie, and a blue Bucharian kippah, wore a face of equal elation and pride as he spoke erev Shabbat to Congregation Hakafa at a community center in Winnetka, Ill.— an affluent suburb of Chicago—about his community of 800 Jews in central-eastern Uganda. In addition to limited running water during the rainy season, the community now has five synagogues, a primary school and a secondary school.

“This is so good,” Moses said to an overfilled room of assorted ages and backgrounds. “It is so important to have brothers and sisters together from all around the world, to come together as Jews.”

The Winnetka visit was only one stop on Moses’ month-long speaking tour at Reform and Conservative congregations around the United States. He hopes to educate fellow Jews on the history of the Abayudaya, collect contributions to help the population grow and advertise for the fifth annual two-week long trip to visit the community, which will take place next month.

Although the Abayudaya have been practicing Jewish customs learned from military and political leader Semei Kakungulu since 1919, 300 of them underwent formal halakhic conversion to Judaism in 2002. The conversion was conducted by Rabbi Howard Gorin of Congregation Tikvat Israel, a Conservative synagogue in Rockville, Md., with a team of other conservative rabbis. Gorin said this trip was his first to Africa, but he has since been back to Uganda, and will soon visit the Jewish communities in Nigeria.

“One of my biggest fears was that this would be a nominally Jewish community,” said Gorin, “But this was an organic Jewish community—they were so powerful in their commitment and it even more powerful because they were practicing in Uganda.” He says the conversion was especially important to the Abayudaya because served as a formal introduction to the Jewish community worldwide.

Moses discovered his own Judaism during the reign of President Idi Amin (1971-1978), a ruler who was notoriously unaccepting of other religions and ethnicities. He said people, such as his father, were jailed and harassed for being Jewish. Moses himself was punished by his teachers for not going to school on Shabbat as he was required to.

“I would be lashed by my teachers because I wouldn’t go to school on Shabbat,” Moses said. “I also saw my father be put in prison because he built a Sukkah—the government thought he was building a place for rebels to meet.”

During this time period, the number of Jews in Uganda fell from 3,000 to 300. Following Amin’s reign, however, Moses helped to build the community to its present day numbers. Today, Moses said, Jewish children go to school alongside the local Christians and Muslims, praying in synagogues made of mud and shells.

Following a brief oneg—celebration—the Winnetka congregants left their makeshift synagogue in the community house made of wood and drywall, wallpaper and flowered curtains, and got in their cars to drive home.

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This is what should have printed, but due to an extreme error in judgment, a complete lack of respect, and my inability to fight back, an atrocity actually appears on the page. Embarrassingly enough, "raise awareness" actually appeared in the edit: I tried to edit it out.

I sometimes wonder why I care.