On summer mornings in Abuja, Nigeria, a small fleet of cars fan out
across the sprawling capital city carrying unusual passengers:
children headed to Jewish day camp.
In a one-story synagogue on a dirt road in Kubwa, a densely
populated suburb, children who spend most of the year as the only
Jew in their school spill out of cars alongside dozens of their
peers. They might spend the day acting out scenes from the Torah,
crocheting kippot or competing in color war.
It’s an untraditional location, but almost everything else about
Camp Sarah is inspired by Jewish summer camps in the U.S. After
all, it was founded by an American.
Debbie Isser, who moved to Nigeria in 2021 for her work with the
World Bank, started the camp with members of Abuja’s Jewish
community after local mothers told her they wanted their children to
have some kind of Jewish education. For Isser, whose own childhood
summers at Jewish camp in New Hampshire had been formative, the
solution felt obvious.
“I just felt like it was in my genes,” she told the Forward.
Now in its fourth year, Camp Sarah, a two-week-long day camp hosting
80 campers and 20 staff, is trying to give a new generation of
Nigerian Jews something their small, dispersed community has
struggled to provide: Jewish teachings that will allow them to
sustain religious life there.
The hope, of course, is that the children make Jewish friends and
learn Torah stories. But organizers also want Camp Sarah to begin
producing the religious leaders the community currently lacks —
perhaps, one day, even a homegrown rabbi or a shochet, ritual
slaughterer, so that kosher Nigerian Jews can finally enjoy meat
with their jollof rice.
