A Tree of Friendship: World Jewish Relief’s Visit to Nasenyi

THE MORNING of 6 October 2026 began early in Nasenyi, eastern Uganda. Long before the guests arrived, members of the Orthodox Jewish communities of Nasenyi, Putti and several neighbouring villages had already gathered at the synagogue, dressed for prayer and ready to welcome visitors from World Jewish Relief (WJR), the British Jewish humanitarian organisation.

Founded in 1933, World Jewish Relief helped some 65,000 Jews escape Nazi persecution and rebuild their lives. Today, in Rwanda, Uganda and Kenya, it works with smallholder farming communities through its Business TransFARMing projects, helping farmers become agricultural entrepreneurs.

The visitors were Paul Anticoni OBE, WJR’s chief executive; Danny Rosenkranz and his wife, Cathy; and Ekaterina Mitiaev, WJR’s Head of Impact and Livelihoods. Their tour guide brought them into the community, and within minutes everyone filed into the synagogue for Shacharit, the morning prayers, led by Rabbi Elisha.

It was a high-spirited Shacharit. The synagogue was full, many of the men were wrapped in tefillin, and the prayers rose with deep kavanah, heartfelt intention. When it ended, Paul could not hide how moved he was. It was an amazing prayer, he said; it had been a long time since he had prayed among people with so much tefillin and so much kavanah. Several people then spoke, including Aaron Diibo, the chairman of the community, before Danny was introduced as “Mzee”, a Swahili title of respect for an elder, and called up to the bimah. He greeted the congregation with a few words of Swahili before continuing in English.

Farming as a path forward

Rabbi Elisha is also part of Jewish Response Uganda, a non-profit run by the Jewish community of Nasenyi. Its focus is agriculture: training farmers, providing farming packages, and changing an old belief that farming is only for the poor.

Tarphon Kamya, a director of Jewish Response Uganda, explained one of its boldest ideas. Jewish Response Uganda is working to bring farming into the secondary school experience. Once students finish secondary school, each is given a portion of land to manage and farm on a large scale for two full years. Jewish Response Uganda helps find a market for the harvest, and most of the money raised is saved to cover the young person’s first year of university. It is a program already running, turning a farm plot into a path to higher education.

The community, Kahal Kadosh She’erit Yisrael (KKSY) of Nasenyi, also farms together. It holds about six hectares of communal farmland, which are shared out family by family on a rotating basis. A tractor donated from Canada now serves these fields. When a family needs land ploughed or ridged, it simply pays for the fuel and the tractor is brought to its plot. Outsiders can rent the tractor too, bringing in income for the community and making it a small enterprise of its own.

It is a conviction already taking root elsewhere in the country, through Rice Farming, Tourism, and Economic Tree Planting in Uganda. In Nasenyi, it was clear once more: land, worked well, can lift a whole community.

Mzee” tells his story

After prayers, the guests sat down to breakfast in the shade of a tree, with the community’s elders gathered around them. Paul, who studied agriculture and forestry at Newcastle and Oxford, moderated the conversation, while Ekaterina made sure the meal flowed smoothly from start to finish.

Seated beside Cathy, Mzee Danny shared a story that made the gathering fall quiet.

Danny’s parents arrived in Kenya from Poland as refugees and settled in the steep highlands around Molo and Elburgon, near Nakuru, almost 9,000 feet above sea level. Danny was born there, and he was 15 years old before electricity reached the area for the first time. His father worked in a sawmill, cutting timber, while Danny and his mother worked the farm and kept cattle. Over the years the farm prospered, and the family eventually passed some of the farmland on to the Black Kenyan farmers who had worked the land alongside them.

The Jewish families of that area, many of them refugees from Europe, formed a congregation in 1941, praying in private homes until they built the Nakuru synagogue in 1956. Their memory still lingers in the same highlands where Kenyan Jews today are Celebrating Passover at 8,000 Feet in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley. In time, however, those early Jewish settlers all left. The synagogue was sold to the Kenyan government and is now a charity home. Organised Jewish life in Kenya today is centred in Nairobi.

Yet the story did not end there. Decades later, Jewish life has returned to the very hills where Danny grew up. Today there are indigenous Kenyan Jewish communities in Molo and near Elburgon: local families who have embraced Torah for themselves, quite apart from the European settlers who once lived among them. Like the farmers of Danny’s youth, they too live from the land, raising dairy cattle in the cool highlands, as captured in Scaling Dairy Dreams: How Cattle Rearing Can Lift Remote Kenyan Jewish Communities Out of Poverty. The spark that seemed to go out when the last European Jews left has been rekindled, this time by Kenyans themselves.

For the Jews of Nasenyi, many of them farmers themselves, it was striking to hear a visitor describe Jewish life rooted in the same East African soil. When Danny finished, Paul opened the floor, and the elders asked question after question about Kenya, farming and Jewish life then and now. When the visitors asked what the community needed most, one elder answered without hesitation: a primary or secondary school run by the community itself, so that its children could study freely, keep their faith and choose their own path in education.

Whenever Danny spoke, one theme kept returning: parnassah, earning a living. Despite his age, he repeatedly stressed that what he teaches is how to make parnassah, how to make money from the land. Growing up on a working farm instilled in him a spirit of entrepreneurship, and the techniques that made his family’s farm a success in Kenya became the model he still passes on today. Through his work with WJR’s partners, he teaches farmers those methods and helps fund them to put them into practice, in the very region where he grew up. WJR supports both Jews and non-Jews in Kenya and Uganda, with farming at the heart of much of its work.

A tree of friendship

Before the guests left, the community held a small tree-planting ceremony. A hole was dug, and a young jackfruit tree was handed to Danny, who held it together with his wife and set it into the ground. It was watered.

As it went into the soil, the whole community gathered around and sang “Siman Tov u’Mazal Tov”, clapping and dancing around the tree. The jackfruit grows slowly but lives for decades and bears heavy fruit, a fitting symbol for a relationship the community hopes will grow for years to come.

The visitors then said their goodbyes, climbed into their car and drove off. The next day, the community and its guests gathered again as KKSY and World Jewish Relief marked the October 7th anniversary under Two Flags, One Grief.

Roots that hold

The same hunger for parnassah is stirring in Jewish communities across the continent. In Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria, Beth Ha’arachman Jewish Community has its own story of land and livelihood, told in From Feathers to Fruit: How Shehechayanu Oil Mills Turned a Setback into Beth Ha’arachman’s Path to Self-Sufficiency. Like Nasenyi, it is a community ready to grow, and to show what African Jewish farmers can achieve with the right knowledge and support.

The visit lasted only a morning, but it joined several stories into one: a Polish Jewish family who once farmed Kenya’s highlands, a Ugandan Jewish community training its young people to farm at scale, and a British Jewish organisation helping both. In Nasenyi, the jackfruit tree now stands as a reminder that roots, carefully planted and watered, can hold people together across countries and generations.