In that interview, she said that “Africa is all I know... the people are friendly, the Jewish community is close and safe – I love it here”.
Debbie Bensaid with her husband Rabbi Yerah Bensaid (photo: Chabad)[Missing Credit]
Another Congolese person with Jewish heritage is among their most senior politicians. Moïse Katumbi leads the Together for the Republic party and for eight years was the governor of the Katanga Province, one of the country’s four provinces between 1966 and 2015.
He was born in 1964 to a Zambian mother and a Sephardi Jewish father who fled Rhodes in 1938 with his two sisters when the fascist Italian regime took over. Of the 1,674 Jews deported from the island to Auschwitz during the Second World War, just 151 survived.
Katumbi also has been the president of domestic football club TP Mazembe in Lubumbashi since 1997, and was described by The Economist in 2015 as “probably the second most powerful man in the Democratic Republic of Congo after the president”.
The history of Jews in the region reportedly traces back to 1907, when eastern European Jews from Poland and Romania arrived in what was then called the Congo Free State, privately owned by King Leopold II, the second king of the Belgians.
A large influx of Jews came in 1911, three years after the country became Belgian Congo, when significant numbers of Sephardim came from the Greek island of Rhodes to settle.
Most of them went to live in Lubumbashi, then called Élisabethville, and a synagogue was built there in 1930, presided over by Rabbi Moïse Lévy. A handful also lived in the capital, Kinshasa, which was at the time called Léopoldville.
When the country gained independence in 1960, it was home to around 2,500 Jewish people, mostly Sephardim, and around half living in Lubumbashi. Many left at that point to settle in Israel or South Africa, as the subsequent few years were violent and bloody.
During the colonial period many of the Jews were travelling salesmen, and their daily relations with the Congolese people “set them apart from other whites” and they “never assimilated to the Belgians”, according to a paper by researcher Dirk Kohnert.
Immediately after its independence, Holocaust hero David Sompolinsky visited the country. He was shocked by its advancement in medicine and technology and was pleased by his warm welcome by the Congolese people.
David Sompolinsky in DR Congo (photo: courtesy Sompolinsky family)[Missing Credit]
Sompolinsky, who had risked his life to save hundreds of Danish Jews from the Nazis, said that “preventative medicine in the Congo is incomparably more developed than in Israel… they have equipment that we in Israel don’t even dream of”.
And he described the Congolese – who he said clarified that it was only the Belgians that they hated, rather than all white people – as “a marvellous people, warm and full of faith in the future”.
Most of the Jews who remain in DR Congo today speak Ladino, a Spanish-Jewish language. Both Lubumbashi, where most of the Jews live, and Kinshasa, whose Chabad is the movement’s central African headquarters, have a synagogue. Both cities also have a Jewish cemetery.
The community is still well-respected and integrated into Congolese society – former president Joseph Kabila even sent a representative to a Chabad celebration just days after an attack on his residence in 2011.
Looking ahead to Wednesday, most will expect England to triumph over DR Congo in the first round of the World Cup knockout stage.
But if the Leopards manage to pull off one of the all-time-great World Cup shocks, there will be a few kippah-wearing Kinshasans and leining Lubumbashiens jumping for joy in the streets of sub-Saharan Africa.
England v DR Congo kicks off at 5pm on Wednesday 1 July, with live television coverage on BBC One.
