About us

Beth yeshourun is a warm, dynamic, joyous, friendly and welcoming Jewish community located in Cameroon, Central Africa, with its main synagogue in a little town called Sa'a which is about one hour by car far from Yaounde (the capital city), and other synagogues in Yaounde, Garoua, Douala. Isolated and self-taught for more than 10 years, we finally got our isolation broken thanks to Kulanu, an organization that supports isolated and emerging and returning jewish groups all over the world. Two Kulanu volunteers (Rabbi Gerald and Rabbanit Bonita Sussmans of the synagogue Temple Emmanuel of New-york) visited us for the first time during the summer 2010. Today, we are dedicated to more engaged Torah observance, to the love of Israel, the homeland of the Israelites and we try to develop and maintain a spiritually vibrant and mutually supportive community.

History

Formerly a Christian congregation, we decided to embrace judaism in 1998 after reading the bBible carefully and discovering the many inconsistencies in the New Testament and total contradiction with the Old Testament.

It is finally in 1998 that, thanks to our dedication to the bible study, we decided to serve God the same way Jesus himself served him. There was no other meaning to this: We had just decided to become Jews. Since then, we have been making all our efforts to upgrade our knowledge of Judaism and its observance. Internet helped us a lot. We also have been praying God to help us being converted one day.

Our leader, Serge Etele, started demarches to build connections with other Jewish communities and to get rabbis' support for our conversion. Rabbi Jeremy Gordon of the New London Synagogue accepted to help and recommanded us to Rabbi Jonathan Ginsburg who had a long distance conversion program and who had been giving us courses for months.

Nearly four months later, Serge found Kulanu. Kulanu got interested in our story and soon later, there were volunteers avaible to visit our community. The Holy One, blessed be He, heard our prayers and answered by sending us His envoys (Rabbis Gerald & Bonita Sussmans) to break our isolation.

Today, we are proud to be Jews and we whole heartedly wish to say thank you to all those who have been involved or who are still involved in helping us.