Members of the Tribe

Photos: Ari Greenspan

In keeping up with our halachic adventures, Ari Zivotofsky and I try to visit off-the-beaten-track Jewish communities regularly. But while Covid put a huge dent in our travels, we did receive a plea last year from the Jewish community in Nairobi, Kenya, to come and help provide them with kosher meat and chickens for Pesach, as their supply from previous shechitahs had dwindled.

The bylaws of Nairobi’s Hebrew Congregation — the 100-year-old synagogue in the capital that serves Jewish ex-pats from Israel and Europe living in Kenya, along with white Kenyans whose forbears arrived a century ago  — require that only kosher food be used for shul functions, and the only way for them to have reasonably priced meat is to bring in a shochet. I’ve done it for them gratis the past few rounds, which is my pleasure: They fly us to Africa and then we have the opportunity to visit some fascinating enclaves most people have never heard of. (On one of these trips, I decided to go on a gorilla Safari, when I was summoned by a Chabad shaliach for a local British woman whose baby needed a bris.)

We planned our trip for the week before Pesach, but just then Kenya went into lockdown and we had to delay it and rescheduled for the summer. This time, due to several technical factors, I went solo.

As we all know, in order to travel from Israel, you needed a Covid test before you departed and before you got on the plane back to Israel. That’s generally not a problem in Western countries, but when we asked one of our African Jewish friends in Tanzania how we could get a test so we could fly home, he calmed us down. “No problem,” he said. “We have a lab here in Arusha, just pay and I can guarantee you a negative result.”