Home          Archives           Jerusalem Center Homepage       View the current issue           Jerusalem Center Videos           
Back

A Look at Zambia-Israel Ties


(Times of Zambia) Foreign Affairs Minister Harry Kalaba re-opened Zambia's embassy in Israel early this month, the third African country to open an embassy in Israel after South Sudan and Rwanda. Kalaba said Zambia expects "cooperation and the strengthening of ties" over a wide range of fields, including economic, security, agriculture, and tourism. Many Jews came to Zambia from the Baltic states of the Russian Empire, now Lithuania and Latvia, in large numbers from the 1880s onwards as economic migrants, and refugees fleeing religious and political persecution. The first synagogue in Zambia (then called Northern Rhodesia) was established in Livingstone in 1910 and the foundation stone of the synagogue, now the Church of Christ, was laid in 1928. Livingstone's Jewish population was reinforced in the late 1930s by a new influx of German Jewish refugees from Nazism and there was an even larger influx of Polish, and mainly Christian, refugees during the Second World War. The Zambian Jewish community, at its height, numbered about 1,200 in an overall white population of 80,000.
2015-09-18 00:00:00
Full Article

Subscribe to
Daily Alert

Name:  
Email:  

Subscribe to Jerusalem Issue Briefs

Name:  
Email: