Under the African Radar

Photos: Ari Greenspan and Ari Z. Zivotofsky

Think of the East African country of Tanzania and you might conjure up images of Mount Kilimanjaro, the world’s highest freestanding mountain with its three famed volcanic cones and intrepid hikers; nomadic Maasai warriors with their bright red wraps and flamboyant headgear; or the great Serengeti plains with its millions of migrating wildebeest and its herds of elephants, lions, giraffes and other wild game.

What you probably won’t imagine is an authentic but essentially unknown Jewish community in these parts. And yet, there it is, in Arusha, Tanzania — a kehillah literally concealed from world Jewry, whose reemergence from underground is due to a dedicated young attorney and university lecturer named Yehudah Amir Kahalani.

On our recent trip to Tanzania, as we exited the small African airport and passed the sign warning about the Ebola virus, we were met by two men with yarmulkes and flying tzitzis: Yehudah Kahalani (his local Tanzanian name is Peres Parpaih) and his brother Shimon. It was their father, a man well-versed in the Yemenite traditions of his ancestors, who charged Yehudah with a mission before he died in 2010: Keep the Jewish community alive.

But how did these Jews, who unflinchingly maintained their ancestors’ traditions, manage to stay under the radar all these years? There was a little-known community of Yemenite Jews who crossed over the Gulf of Aden into East Africa in the 1880s. Some of them went south through Ethiopia and Kenya and settled in present-day Tanzania, searching for financial opportunity. There they met up with Ethiopian and Moroccan Jews who’d also migrated south. Later, in the 1930s, a number of Polish Jewish refugees added to the number of Jews in the area. 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.