HARARE, Zimbabwe — Modreck Maeresera is a happy man these days. Growing up in rural Zimbabwe, Maeresera, 49, was always told of his unique Jewish roots, which separated his Lemba community from the rest of their neighbors. Nonetheless, there was nothing tangible to make him feel any different.

Without any physical distinction from their neighbors and without any open religious congregations of their own, many of Maeresera’s peers couldn’t resist the lure of joining the mainstream Zimbabwean society in which they lived. This assimilation trend by younger members of the Lemba community prompted soul-searching by some, resulting in a decision to retrace the way back to their original Jewish faith.

“The community was disturbed by the rate of assimilation that was happening especially when young Lembas moved to the cities and interacted with people from different religious and ethnic backgrounds,” Maeresera told Religion Unplugged, explaining the start of their journey to retrace their steps back to Judaism.

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“In the back of our minds there was that realization that we were Jewish,” he added. “However, we had not what I would call ‘prayer infrastructure.’ … We did not have a Friday night Shabbat service, we did not have a Saturday morning Shabbat service, so that created some sort of a vacuum within our culture and our way of life. We wanted to fill that vacuum with an active and observant Jewish life, so we actively sought to return to active Judaism as an official religion of the Lemba.”

The Lemba community, whose roots are traceable to Israel, has lived among the local communities for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, but has largely managed to maintain its Jewish religious and cultural practices. These include donning skull caps and practicing circumcision (not a tradition for most Zimbabweans); abstaining from eating pork and food with animal blood as forbidden in the Torah; and conducting ritual animal slaughter, among other things.

According to oral tradition, the Lemba are descendants of seven Jewish men who left Judea 2,500 years ago and eventually married African women. The ancestors of this community are said to have entered Africa via Yemen some centuries ago, and moved south over the years, settling among many African communities, including what is present-day Zimbabwe.

DNA tests confirm Jewish heritage

Spurred by the shared desire to return to their original Jewish roots, a Lemba Jewish renaissance started taking place in earnest in the mid-1990s. Coincidentally, around the same time, their efforts were boosted by results of DNA research by Professor Tudor Parfitt, from the University of London, that confirmed that the 150,000-community living in central Zimbabwe and the northern-most part of South Africa indeed has Jewish ancestry.

The research showed that Lemba men carry the Cohen Modal Haplotype, a set of Y chromosome characteristics typical of the Jewish priesthood, at about the same rate as that of major Jewish populations.

“This was amazing,” Prof Parfitt told BBC of the results of his two-decade research. “It looks as if the Jewish priesthood continued in the West by people called Cohen, and in same way it was continued by the priestly clan of the Lemba. They have a common ancestor who geneticists say lived about 3,000 years ago somewhere in north Arabia, which is the time of Moses and Aaron when the Jewish priesthood started.”

Buoyed by this seal of approval, Maeresera and his few Lemba leaders did not look back, searching for ways to ensure that their community was able to relive a truly Jewish life.

This Jewish renaissance among the Lemba has worked. Today, there are six Jewish congregations around Zimbabwe where they are able to freely and openly celebrate Shabbat and, more recently, Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur in addition to regular worship services.

Kulanu assistance make dream come true

Maeresera said the Lemba’s desire to return to mainstream Judaism resulted in their being linked to Kulanu (“all of us”), a U.S.-based movement that supports isolated, emerging and returning Jewish communities around the globe.

“The Lemba relationship with Kulanu began in 1996 when Kulanu first contacted our Lemba brothers and sisters in South Africa … and later with us, the Zimbabwean Lemba,” he said.  “Thus, began our journey from isolated Jewish community to the path of renewal and hopefully reintegration into mainstream Judaism, the religion of our forefathers.”

It was nearly two decades later, in 2012, that the Lemba had an opportunity to celebrate their first ever Pesach seder as a community.

“[Kulanu] visited us and listened to our desires, mainly the desire to return to mainstream Judaism, so they started helping us and in 2012 we had our first traditional Pesach seder [Passover holiday meal],” Maeresera said. “In 2013, we had two Pesach seders in Harare and Masvingo and those became our two first Jewish congregations in Zimbabwe where we held Shabbat services as is normal within any observant Jewish community.”

Since then, four other congregations have been established in the country. With Kulanu’s help, the Lemba have since started building their own synagogue in Masvingo, a building which is yet to be completed.

Kulanu has also facilitated the visiting of live-in teachers to Zimbabwe, donations of books and tours of Israel and the United States by several Lemba members.

Also, through Kulanu, the Lemba were given a haggadah — a book of historic prayers and rituals) — which they have since translated into the local Shona language.

“There are different kinds of these books called haggadot [plural for haggadah]. They hold pretty much the same theme, but Jewish denominations can add slightly different things to that haggadah, so we decided to come up with our own haggadah that is for the Lemba, which tells — among other things — our history, our songs, our traditions [and] joined together with the mainstream Jewish Passover traditions, especially during the Passover seder,” Maeresera said. “Now we have our own haggadah. It’s in Hebrew, English and Shona so that our people in the countryside can also understand and follow when we are holding these Passover seders.”

The same has also been done to the many songs that the Lemba have composed, which are based on broader Jewish themes and traditions.

“We composed songs out of the normal Jewish morning Shabbat services,” Maeresera said. “Before that we had visitors coming from France, Israel and the U.S. to teach us and there are many different tunes to different prayers that we do on Friday night and Saturday morning services, so every teacher taught us their own songs. We had a musician within our Harare congregation, Hamlet Zhou, who then started composing our own tunes for prayers. Hamlet led that project. Most of our songs were composed this way.”

Why challenges remain

Although a lot of progress has been made since the decision to return to mainstream Judaism was made, Maeresera, who serves as president of the Harare Lemba Synagogue, said there is still a lot of work to be done.

Being a tiny minority in a country of about 16 million (Zimbabwe is nearly 70% Protestant), the Lemba people face many social pressures, some of which make it hard for them to observe their religious practices. For example, it is very hard for them to find kosher foods, schools that allow their children to freedom of religion or jobs with conditions of service that are flexible enough for them to observe their Jewish religious and cultural practices.

In order to stem rapid assimilation and preserve their genetic make-up, Lemba men are discouraged from marrying non-Lembas, but some young men and women who move to urban areas and other economic centers sometimes marry outsiders, further putting pressure on the community. Some members of the Lemba community are even Christians or Mulsims, having converted to these religions when there were no Jewish congregations in the country.

As climate change ravages southern Africa, leaving millions without food, Maeresera said it is the community’s desire to end their dependence on donor aid by embracing the concept of “food sovereignty.”

To achieve this, they have started irrigation projects on all their rural congregations in and around their congregations.

“We need to be working for the other six days for our Shabbat rest to have true meaning,” Maeresera said.

Cyril Zenda is a Christian and an African journalist and writer based in Harare, Zimbabwe.