Yom Kippur in Ghana

The Jewish community in Accra is pretty slim as you can imagine and is made up of all expats, many of them from Israel. Alan and I have made a little mini Jewish community in our compound and we usually get together for holidays and eat food together. It's very nice and has become our little Jewish Accra family. This year, my friend Gilda, convinced us to go to Yom Kippur services last night at the local Chabad house. For those of you who may not know about Chabad Jews, they are Hasidic Orthodox Jews who are dispersed all over the world. They set up centers for Jewish worship and activities and to our surprise, they exist in Ghana! We decided we'd check it out in the hopes that we'd meet some other interesting people. Unfortunately, the word "disappointment" was an understatement of the experience.

So Gilda and her husband, Allan, our other friend Dyane, and the 3 of us headed out to find Yom Kippur services in Ghana. As usual, the evening began with total confusion about where this place was and aimless driving in traffic trying to find the house where we were told the services would be held. Only an address was provided to us and addresses are totally useless here. as street names and numbers don't really exist. We thought we had found it at one point after we saw loads of cars parked on the side of the road so the 6 of us piled out of the car and walked down the street to find a party that was most certainly not Yom Kippur services. So we piled back into our cars, Eli virtually asleep on my shoulder, to continue the search. After 20 minutes we finally found the place that was actually guarded by Accra police! So of course we were now late and so when the 6 of us entered, stroller and all, we found ourselves in small crowded room divided into two sections - one for the men and one for the women - and all 30 eyes turned towards us. They were right in the middle of prayers and we must have looked like a motley crew who wandered in off the street! Or at least that's what we felt like. So we quickly took our seat according to gender. There were no prayer books for us so we just listened as the Chabad Rabbi lead the prayers in quickfire Hebrew. Eli was fast asleep in his stroller but I held my breath in anticipation of the noise he'd make when he woke up. Since I had no idea what was taking place during the services (this service was much different from the kind I grew up with in a reform synagogue), I took notice of all the details around us. It was really a quite strange space they tried to create for a synagogue. It reminded me nothing of the peaceful serene synagogues I've been in before. It was really a horribly ugly room. The low ceilings were covered in some fake wood paneling lit by florescent lights. Fans hummed above us. The chairs were covered in the most tacky white ruffled silk covers that might have been more appropriate for a wedding (but even then would have been pretty horrible looking). There was a ripped satin sheet separating the men and the woman which was thrown over some African metal status (I could see the little statues' legs poking out underneath). And to top it off, the sheet was secured with plastic clothespins. I mean, really....could we have not done a little better? It was as far as you can get from a spiritual place of worship. And to make matters worse, cans of Raid were line up on the shelf on the wall next to us. So for an hour, I sat there as the Chabad Rabbi would read off a page number of a prayer book we didn't have, then chant in Hebrew for 5 minutes before reading the next page number and so on and so on. Gilda, Dyane and I, who all sat in a row, just kept throwing each other glances like, "when can we leave." Gilda even whispered to me, "when is Eli going to wake up so we can use that as an excuse to leave?" Luckily, before we knew it, people closed their prayer books and made movements towards the door which we took as a sign that it was over. And Eli woke up just then!

So, I think we'll be sticking to our Jewish holiday meals together which somehow feel much more spiritual than that service did. I guess maybe we were looking for some sort of connection to other Jews but this made us feel even more disconnected and unwelcome. A bit of a disappointment but definitely an experience.