9th Reverse Tashlich: African Jewish Communities Take Up the Call to Repair the Sea

ON ROSH HASHANAH, Jews around the world go down to the water to perform Tashlich, symbolically casting away their sins. Reverse Tashlich turns that ancient ritual into action. Instead of throwing into the water, participants take out of it, removing the plastic and waste that humanity has cast into rivers, lakes and seas.

The initiative was founded by Rabbi Ed Rosenthal through Repair the Sea (Tikkun HaYam), a Jewish marine conservation organisation that teaches care for the waters through the lens of bal tashchit, the Torah’s prohibition against needless waste and destruction. This year marked its ninth edition, and once again African Jewish communities were among its most committed participants.

A New Format: Four Weeks Instead of One Day

For the first time, the ninth Reverse Tashlich broke away from the single-day format of earlier editions, which were usually held just before Rosh Hashanah. Instead, organizers opened a four-week window, from Sunday, 6 September, to Sunday, 4 October, the end of Simchat Torah, allowing teams across Africa and around the world choose the day that suited them best.

The change grew out of challenging experience. In past editions, teams set out only to be stopped by heavy rain that made collecting plastic impossible, forcing them to suspend work and return the next day. In other cases, logistics got in the way: a supervisor missed the ferry to an island where his team stood waiting and had to spend the night on the mainland before the cleanup could go ahead. The flexible window gave every team room to work safely and well.

Uganda: From the Islands to the North

Uganda fielded some of this year’s most active teams. The Save the Nile Foundation team carried out two operations at Kisima One and Kisima Two islands, both located in Lake Victoria off the Masese Landing site in Jinja town, where the River Nile began its journey, crossing several countries to get to Egypt. The Kisima Islands plastic cleaning became among the last cleanups of this 9th edition, completed around 5–6 October with Rabbi Ed’s permission.

In Namanyonyi, the community returned to the Namatala River, which flows about a kilometer behind the Namanyonyi synagogue. The area is mountainous, so when the rains come, runoff from the slopes of Mount Elgon and the communities higher up carries waste down into the valley and the river. Plastic floats freely on its surface, and during Reverse Tashlich the community wades in to lift it out. This year the team collected approximately 29,000 bottles, according to figures published by Reverse Tashlich, adding to the more than 40,000 they removed in their debut edition about four years ago.

Further north, the Kwania team, led by Joram Obak, spiritual leader of the Kwania Jewish community and a Hebrew teacher, took on the shores of Lake Kwania. Together with Lake Kyoga, it is among the last large bodies of water a traveller will see in northern Uganda before Lira and the road to the South Sudan border. A town of more than 5,000 people lives in scattered settlements near the lake, with trading centers and markets along its edge. Plastic bottles for medicine, body lotion, drinking water, and, above all, soda are discarded on the ground, and the rain and the lake breeze carry them into the water. That waste is what the Kwania team set out to clear.

Kenya: Clearing the Dams of the Rift Valley

High in Kenya’s Rift Valley, home to the Jewish communities we visited while Celebrating Passover at 8,000 Feet in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, the Elburgon community near Molo held its Reverse Tashlich at Njane Dam, close to its synagogue. Here, the task was not plastic but aquatic weeds, which in places rise as much as two metres above the surface of the water. Led by Michael Ben Moshe, the community’s chazzan, who set the example by wading in himself, the team pulled them out by hand.

The work matters more than it might seem. These dams are built on the mountainous slopes of the Rift Valley to trap water for irrigating nearby farms and for grazing animals to drink. In some dams, aquatic weeds have already taken over around 10% of the surface. When they spread, they can block the inlets and outlets, causing the water to rise beyond its banks. A dam holding a large volume of water can then flood the surrounding farmland, destroy crops and, in the worst cases, put lives at risk. The overgrowth also cuts off the air and sunlight that the fish in the dam depend on. Left alone, the weeds can keep spreading until they choke the dam and the water dries up. Clearing a dam fully can take heavy machinery such as excavators, and a single day’s work by hand can only remove a fraction of the weeds. But the Elburgon team’s effort serves as a demonstration, showing that with regular care these weeds can be kept in control before they take over.

Nigeria: Lake, Beach and Football Pitch

In Abuja, Maccabi United took on Jabi Lake, one of the sites where Reverse Tashlich made its debut in West Africa. For the club, the cleanup came straight after the match that capped an impressive start to the season, with two draws in their opening week, proving that their commitment to the community reaches well beyond the football pitch.

In Akwa Ibom State, the young students of Brachot Yeshiva went down to Ibino Beach on the Atlantic coast to clear plastic from the shoreline. These children are no strangers to the work. They faithfully take part in both of Repair the Sea’s annual cleanups: Reverse Tashlich during the High Holidays, and Bedikat HaMayim, the pre-Passover cleanup inspired by Miriam and the waters that once saved our ancestors: the River Nile, which sheltered baby Moshe, and the Red Sea, which parted for the Israelites as Miriam led the women in song. Since water once saved us, it is now our turn to save the waters. Their bond with the movement runs so deep that the school named its computer laboratory after Rabbi Ed Rosenthal.

Cameroon and Ghana

In Cameroon, Rabbi Haïm Israël Mpodol, rabbi of the Beth Goshen community, part of the Bantu Israelites of Yaoundé, led his team in cleaning the Yaoundé Municipal Lake. Rabbi Haïm has built strong ties with American and Israeli diplomatic networks in Cameroon. This was not the first time Beth Goshen had participated in such an event. The community has taken part in earlier editions of Reverse Tashlich and more recently joined Bedikat HaMayim, the pre-Passover cleanup, making them the most active Repair the Sea team in Cameroon.

In Ghana, members of a Jewish congregation in Accra cleaned up along the Atlantic shoreline, linking West Africa’s coastal communities in one shared act of repair.

One Continent, One Mission

From Lake Victoria’s islands to the shores of the Atlantic, from the Rift Valley to the heart of Abuja, African Jewish communities showed that Tikkun Olam is a commitment carried out with gloves, sacks and determination.

African Jewish Voices has proudly stood with Repair the Sea as a media partner. At the launch of the fifth edition of the African Jewish Voices magazine, the ninth Reverse Tashlich banner was unveiled alongside the magazine’s front cover. The same design went on to grace the magazine’s back cover, a sign of how closely the two missions are bound together.

With this edition complete, attention now turns to Bedikat HaMayim, the pre-Passover cleanup. Teams across the continent are already looking ahead to returning to the waters before Pesach, and African Jewish Voices will be there to tell their story.

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