Yom Kippur In Uganda: An Easier Fast This Year
A remote community of Jews, who know what it's like to go hungry, are reflecting on what their spiritual leader says was "a good year, really not too bad."
by Sara Toth Stub
Oct 08, 2019
3 minutes
Before Yom Kippur begins at sundown Tuesday, members of Uganda's Namutumba Synagogue will sit down to a festive meal to prepare themselves physically and spiritually for the Day of Atonement.
This Jewish custom of the seuda hamafseket is new for this community, whose members have often entered the 25-hour-long fast on empty stomachs due to drought and food shortages.
"But this year, we will really be able to prepare for the fast and enter it with happiness, with gratefulness," says Namutumba's spiritual leader Shadrach Mugoya Levi by telephone from the Ugandan village of
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