By Rebecca Sealfon, photos courtesy Rabbi Eli Courante
About the Author: Rebecca Sealfon was raised as a Conservative Jew and is a member of West End Synagogue, a Reconstructionist congregation in New York City. A graduate of Princeton University’s Creative Writing program, she has been published in the New York Daily News, Smithsonian magazine, and The Daily Beast. She maintains online forums about Israel-Palestine peace (https://www.quora.com/q/unityisstrength) and other Jewish and Middle Eastern topics (https://www.quora.com/q/ mena) on Quora.com, where her writing has been viewed millions of times. Rebecca is also a professional software engineer and instructor and was named one of the top 50 female all-around software developers in New York City by RecruitLoop. She lives in Harlem, New York City.
For centuries the Sefwi people of Ghana have observed a Saturday Shabbat, as well as Jewish dietary and ritual purity laws, Jewish mourning laws, and circumcision of boys eight days after birth. A few decades ago, a spiritual leader in Sefwi Wiawso, a sparsely populated, 1,000-square-mile district in Western Ghana seven hours’ drive from the Ghanaian capital of Accra, had a vision that the Sefwi people’s ancestors were actually Jews. Thus began the determination of some Sefwi Wiawso residents to connect with other Jewish communities and formally convert to Judaism. Sefwi Wiawso Jews believe their people migrated from farther north, perhaps Timbuktu, and brought ancient Jewish traditions to Ghana.

Rabbi Eli Courante of Toronto’s Lodzer Centre Congregation, a Conservative Egalitarian synagogue, is a busy fellow. In addition to ministering to his congregation, he also runs a business specializing in Jewish travel. He arranges trips to Jewish communities, as well as trips for traditional Jews that cater to needs such as kashrut (Jewish dietary laws) and a prayer minyan (a meeting of at least 10 Jews for public worship). He’s visited Jewish communities all over the world, from Norway to New Zealand, from India to Ethiopia. He’d known about Kulanu for years and finally, at the end of 2019, found the time to start working with the organization. Kulanu immediately connected him with the Jewish community of Sefwi Wiawso.
At first, Rabbi Eli communicated with Sefwi Wiawso Jews by phone and WhatsApp. The community of around 70 members had received 22 smartphones from Kulanu and were putting them to good use to look up information about Judaism. Most spoke English with Rabbi Eli, and a few spoke French. They had many questions. Some questions were directly relevant to community practice. Could a woman come to synagogue during her period? Could she come wearing shorts? How can a meal be kept warm on Shabbat if, without a Jewish neighborhood, congregants may be traveling from far away? The people of Sefwi Wiawso did not know about hot plates, so Rabbi Eli taught them. Other questions were more theoretical. They wanted to know what various verses of the Psalms and Prophets meant, and whether it was time for the Third Temple to be built in Jerusalem. Rabbi Eli was struck by their warmth and passion.
He asked them what the community most needed. They mentioned talaisim (prayer shawls) and tefillin (a pair of black leather boxes — one for the head, one for the arm — containing Hebrew parchment scrolls). Rabbi Eli started a collection within the Lodzer Centre Congregation to obtain them. He had arranged to visit Sefwi Wiawso in February 2020, and by that time, he had dozens of talaisim and seven or eight sets of tefillin for them. He then embarked on a week-long trip to meet the people of Sefwi Wiawso.
Having seen many kinds of Jewish communities in many parts of the world, Rabbi Eli isn’t easily surprised. But on the drive through back roads to Wiawso, the town of 1,500 that is the capital of Sefwi Wiawso district, he was surprised to learn that for his first two days, he would be joining a raucous gathering. Loud music blasted from many speakers, and everyone was singing, dancing, and shaking hands. An elder of the community had died, and the people of Sefwi Wiawso called this ceremony a funeral. Donations were collected for the late elder’s widow and family in his memory. The ceremony is performed a year after the actual death, so the event could also be described as a memorial service or a yahrzeit (among Jews, the anniversary of someone’s death).

The funeral ended at the start of Shabbat. On Shabbat, Rabbi Eli spoke a few words to the congregation in Twi and Sefwi, having learned some phrases in these local languages for the occasion. The Jews of Sefwi Wiawso have their own synagogue, Tifereth Israel Synagogue, complete with two Torah scrolls. Nearly the entire community attends services, including people of all ages. This community has a number of distinctive traditions. For example, on Shabbat, they do not eat meat. Although they take the scrolls out during services, they read from a Chumash (the Torah in printed form) in Sefwi translation. The hazzan (the cantor who leads the congregation in songful prayer) also told Rabbi Eli about an older tradition from years back, of actually pronouncing the Tetragrammaton (the four-letter Hebrew name for God).
And for the first time in his life, Rabbi Eli received a middle name. He was sitting in a room with a half-dozen community members, sharing a meal and talking. As chance would have it, everyone there, including him, was born on Shabbat. In Ghana, children are given the name of the day of the week on which they were born, either as a first or as a middle name. Hence, Kofi Annan, the former United Nations Secretary-General and a Ghanaian, is named for having been born on Friday. Everyone in that room took out their Ghanaian ID, and their IDs all had their middle names, Kwame. They said that since Rabbi Eli was also born on God’s day, he was Rabbi Kwame.
Rabbi Eli met many members of the Sefwi Wiawso community. The hazzan, Shmuel Tetteh, read Hebrew fluently, having taught himself online. Rabbi Eli also spoke at length with Aharon (Alex) Armah, a member of this community who had left to lead and grow the Jewish community near Accra. With hundreds of prospective converts, the Accra congregation is far larger than that of Sefwi Wiawso. Aharon had been sponsored by Kulanu to attend yeshiva in Uganda for four years, and clearly seemed to be the most knowledgeable Sefwi Wiawso resident about Jewish tradition. He hopes to be ordained as a rabbi.
From community members, Rabbi Eli learned quite a lot about Jewish life and general culture in Sefwi Wiawso. For example, he was told a person without a god is viewed as someone who cannot be trusted. In contrast, Jews are not hated at all in Ghana, despite their religious differences from their neighbors. The country and district have great religious diversity, with many Christians and Muslims of various types as well as practitioners of traditional African religions. Regardless of their religious affiliations, the people live quite harmoniously together. Judaism is known in Sefwi Wiawso because of the local community, which is well respected by the other religious groups.
In fact, Aharon had some exciting news to share. His uncle, a non-Jew, had been a local king of an area near Sefwi, close to the Ivory Coast border. In earlier times, if children of the king were designated as successors they would be at risk of assassination. To prevent assassinations, the tradition began to designate a nephew or sibling rather than a child as a king’s successor, chosen by a number of councils after the king’s death. Last year, Aharon was chosen as the heir. As king, he will almost certainly become the first Jew ever to hold that position in West Africa, if not in all Africa. To Rabbi Eli, Aharon seemed passionate, willful, and warm.

At night, Rabbi Eli stayed in the guesthouse, which was built with money donated by the family of the late Michael Gershowitz and from Kulanu’s sales of Sefwi Wiawso handcrafts. The guesthouse even had electricity, and he could sometimes catch internet signals. However, there was no running water. When renovations are completed, the community plans to name the guesthouse after Michael Gershowitz, Kulanu’s first volunteer coordinator for Ghana.
From his trip, Rabbi Eli brought back twenty-five handmade challah covers for Kulanu Canada to sell. Sefwi Wiawso-made challah covers are available for $36 on www. kulanuboutique. com/sefwi-wiawso-ghana or, in Canada, email: andria@kulanucanada.org. The money is sent directly to the Sefwi Wiawso community, where they may use it for future projects such as laying pipes to bring water into the guesthouse.
The Jewish collective experience, with its ancient roots, history in many other civilizations, and strong traditions of scholarly debate, is a crucial element of cultural diversity. Connecting to other Jewish communities, the isolated and dedicated community of Sefwi Wiawso is able to join the larger Jewish world in ways that would not have been possible even a few decades ago. The talaisim and tefillin which Rabbi Eli provided are in good hands, where they will be used and valued. Rabbi Eli returned home knowing he would continue to share his knowledge and help lay the groundwork for building a vital Jewish community in Ghana.