The Sweetest New Year Away From Home

By Penina Goldstein
Tufts University

When traveling away from home, it’s both a challenge and an adventure to seek out surrogate Jewish communities in new and unfamiliar places. I have always loved sitting down in a new shul and discovering that they use melodies from home. The format of the service is familiar and reassuring and the Torah always contains the same words read on the same yearly cycle.

However, when I decided to study abroad in Ghana for the semester, I did not expect to find a Jewish community here. In fact, it is only recently that I have begun to tell my classmates that I am Jewish, because it is such a foreign religion to Ghanaians. Ghana is the most religious place I have ever lived; it is predominantly made up of Christians, with a healthy proportion of Muslims in the mix. Often, when people find out that I do not go to church they assume that I must be Muslim; they are confused and quick to evangelize when they find out I am neither Christian nor Muslim. Judaism is truly a mystery to people here.

Therefore, you can imagine my surprise and delight when I heard about a community of Ghanaian Jews nestled in a small rural community in the Western Region of the country. After a few weeks of back-and-forth contact, arrangements were made for me to travel to the village of Sefwi Wiawso for Rosh HaShanah with a handful of other Jewish students who are also studying here. Throughout my visit, I tried to understand Jewish life in this village in two very different ways—as a fellow Jew attempting to make sense of a set of Jewish beliefs and rituals, and, as a comparative religion major, fascinated by a new and exciting form of religious life.

For several hundred years the people of Sefwi Wiaso observed a ban on work on Saturdays and recently have come to believe that this practice must link them to a Jewish ancestry. Their spiritual leader, Alex Armah, boasts of a community of 80 Jews, who live peacefully with their Christian neighbors.　Alex said he has a dream to learn as much as he can about Judaism in order to teach his congregants about their religion.

The Armah family house, where we stayed, had one mezuzah and had the word Shalom written in chalk over several doorposts. The synagogue is a rectangular concrete building painted white and blue with a corrugated tin roof and two rows of pews inside, one for men and one for women. Women who are menstruating are not allowed in the synagogue, a very Ghanaian concept. There is also a raised bimah area at the front of the room. The ark was a small case in a side room containing a small copy of a Torah, like the ones we give children in America to hold on the holiday of Simhat Torah.

Friday night we began Shabbat by lighting two candles and reading an English translation of Havdallah. Then we said Kiddush (in English) over a cup of Coca Cola and Fanta, followed by handwashing and reciting Motzi (again in English) over two loaves of bread. The family also recited a prayer they had memorized in Twi and sang several songs in Hebrew that previous visitors had taught them, including "Shabbat Shalom," "Hinei Matov Umanayim," "Od Yavo Shalom Aleinu," "Oseh Shalom" and "Eliyahu Hanavi."

That first night a friend and I prepared a bowl full of apples and honey we brought with us from Accra for the Armah family and everyone else who was hanging around the house. I have never seen any apple and honey session quite so sweet... and sticky. They not only put their apple pieces in the honey, but also their entire fists in order to eat as much honey as possible. When we ran out of apples the honey plate was wiped clean by many hands and arms.　Neither apples nor honey are very common in Ghana—apples are imported, and it takes a hunt and some money to acquire honey, so it was truly a special treat for them. But what made the whole experience even sweeter, and properly Ghanaian, was their addition of freshly harvested sugar cane on the second night. I have to admit that I made an absolute mess of myself and had sugar water all over my clothes and body, but it was wonderful. The Ghanaian kids definitely showed us up in the graceful sugar cane eating arena.

We attended three services in the synagogue over the course of the two days we were in the village. The congregation consisted of about seven men, three women, and 25-30 children. The services were a random mix of prayers read in English from a mahzor, Twi songs (Twi is a common Ghanaian language, and we later discovered the songs to be songs that our Christian friends at the university also know), and translations and explanations of the Torah reading also in Twi. When the Torah was taken out and paraded around, the children touched it with their siddurim, kissed the siddurim, and then touched their hearts with the siddurim. The congregants sang while clapping complicated rhythms and dancing freely up and down aisles and pews. It was such a lively and spirited congregation! All of the men attempted to blow the shofar, but none of them succeeded, because (as we later discovered) the hole was impossibly small.

After the afternoon service on the second day, the congregation gave each of us a basket and asked us to join them as they walked to the river, singing the whole way. We joined them in a highly spirited round of "Me Name Ye, My Lord is Good" as we walked and danced hand in hand down the road with beautiful children dressed in their nicest dresses and shirts. At the river we said a few short prayers in English before throwing biscuits into the water.

I will leave you with a few questions about this community and the beginning of my own answers to them. First, how do we, as American Jews, begin to understand and view this community in a Jewish context? At the end of the day, the Torah portions they read may not have been the right ones, the Shema may have been skipped to conserve time for other Rosh Hashanah prayers, they may have never heard of Sukkot and do not know how to read Torah in the original Hebrew, but they are certainly Jewish in my eyes. This community is passionate about their faith in God and Jewish principles and wants nothing more than to continue learning about what it means to practice Judaism as active Jews. Secondly, how much should we, as outsiders, influence the ways in which the Jews of Sefwi Wiawso practice Judaism? It seems to me that piling all of the laws, holidays, and beliefs of Judaism on these people at once would be dangerously overwhelming for them. But currently, we have a community with confused rituals and ideas that they believe to be the same Judaism that is practiced around the world. Finally, how do the Christian and Muslim communities of Ghana view this small Jewish community? The community was forced to relocate 35 years ago because their neighbors attacked them for their foreign practices. However, their new neighbors in Sefwi Wiawso seem supportive and extremely friendly. Indeed, as long as Ghanaians believe in God, their fellow citizens will usually accept them as sufficiently religious people.　

The new year will undoubtedly bring many more questions to grapple with and hopefully many more experiences that will expand my understanding of what it is to be Jewish. I expect to catch myself dancing in the pews of my home synagogue every now and then, and I may just stick my entire fist in a bowl full of honey next Rosh HaShanah.