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Shalom Bwana: La Saga des Juifs du Congo by Moise Rahmani ( Romillat, 2002).22 Euros. To order write to Editions Romillat, 17 rue Pascal F-75005 Paris (romillat@romillat.fr)
Brussels, 1995. A modern apartment block. I have come to interview M. Moïse Lévy, Chief Rabbi of the former Belgian Congo, and his wife Elizabeth. My aim is to find out more about the Jewish community that had existed on the island of Rhodes. The Lévys' lounge with its dark wooden furniture, African artefacts and wooden carvings, a teba at one end, is not only a reminder of that ancient community but also a testament to the young Jews who left the impoverished island in search of a better life in the former Belgian Congo, now Zaïre. There are photographs of visiting dignitaries such as Archbishop Makarios and Dag Hammarsjold being welcomed by the 'grand rabbin', who reminisces about choirs of black children chanting the Ladino songs of early twentieth-century Rhodes they had learnt from the Lévys.
This extraordinary Sephardi world, with its Hasson, Mergian, Alhadeff, Benatar, and Capuia families, this 'paradise', was to be short- lived. The first handful of Jews had arrived in the late 1880s. By the time of the country's independence from Belgium in 1960 there were 3000 thousand. Only some 30 to 50 Jews remain today in Zaire's capital, Kinshasa. With the coming of independence most of the Jewish population left. A large proportion chose to retain their Belgian connection by emigrating to Brussels.
Moïse Rahmani is one of that group of Jews of mixed rodeslí and Congo roots. In his delightful book Shalom Bwana he recalls the trials and tribulations of the mainly Sephardi Jews who set out from Europe in search of economic stability in Africa. He writes evocatively of the hardship and isolation of the early days in a foreign land, the nostalgia for family and the homeland, the joys of meeting up with friends from their past life in Europe. The many accounts and anecdotes recalling individual struggles and achievements come vividly to life as Rahmani interweaves his portraits of the community's pioneers with their personal reminiscences. Particularly moving is the story of Jacques Israel, son of a rodeslí Jew and a black Congolese woman. Jacques' father sent the young child by to Belgium in 1939. Black, Jewish, and doubly vulnerable, he was hidden by nuns from the Germans for the duration of the war. He did not see his father again until several years later. Ever aware of his Jewish origins, Jacques Israel and his Belgian wife converted formally to Judaism, returned to the Congo, and married in the Kinshasa synagogue.
This fascinating book recalls not only life in the former Belgian Congo but also that in the countries from which its Jewish pioneers had come. As in the Ladino song that Mme Lévy sang for me and that she had learnt in her childhood in Rhodes, these Sephardi Jews had had to leave for tierra ajena, 'foreign lands', and are now left only with their fond memories of Jewish life in Rhodes and the Belgian Congo.
Dr Hilary Pomeroy
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