Sephardic Jews of the Congo (Belgian Congo / DRC)

The Jewish community of the Belgian Congo was small but remarkable: a largely Sephardi community, dominated by Ladino-speaking Jews from the island of Rhodes — the Rhodeslis — who settled in the copper-mining region of Katanga from around 1910 and built prosperous trading firms there. For them the Congo was a tierra prometida, a promised land, where they raised their standing and, after the Holocaust destroyed their island community, rebuilt a shattered world.

For the genealogist, the Congo community is one node in a wider Rhodesli network stretching from Rhodes to Egypt, Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), South Africa, Israel, Belgium and the United States. A Congo Sephardi family will almost always connect back to Rhodes — often via Egypt or the Mozambique and Rhodesia ports — and forward to Cape Town, Salisbury or Ashdod.

What does “the Congo” mean here?

One territory under six names, which matters for finding the records.

It was the Congo Free State (1885–1908, King Leopold II’s personal colony), then the Belgian Congo (1908–1960), then independent in 1960 (first the Republic of the Congo / Congo-Léopoldville, from 1964 the Democratic Republic of the Congo), then Zaire (1971–1997), and since 1997 the DRC again.

The Jewish community was concentrated in the south-eastern mining province of Katanga — above all its capital Élisabethville, now Lubumbashi, where the Rhodeslis dominated Jewish life — with a group in the national capital Léopoldville, now Kinshasa, and smaller numbers across the interior of Katanga and Kasai. The Jewish community of the neighbouring Belgian territory of Ruanda-Urundi (now Rwanda and Burundi) was administered together with the Congo’s.

The name-history is a practical point: colonial documents are filed under “Congo Free State” or “Belgian Congo”, the mid-century under “Congo” or “Zaire”, and the modern under “DRC” — and most colonial administrative records went to Belgium.

Where did the community come from?

Rhodes, mostly — and in layers.

A small Ashkenazi presence came first: traders who founded the Congrégation Israélite du Katanga in 1909, and, elsewhere, Eastern European families from Romania and Poland. But the community that would define the Congo was Sephardi and Rhodesli.

The first Jew from Rhodes to reach Katanga was Salomon Benatar, in 1910. Like many, he had come the long way — from Rhodes to Egypt, where Rhodeslis had settled after the Suez Canal opened in 1869, then to the Mozambique port of Beira, then to Umtali (Mutare) in Rhodesia, and finally into the Congo as Élisabethville was founded. Rhodeslis settled through the 1910s and 1920s by chain migration, shuttling back to Rhodes to marry and to bring out relatives. By the interwar years they were the heart of the Élisabethville community; a synagogue followed in 1930.

On numbers, following Miccoli’s 2024 study: between about 1,000 and 1,500 Rhodeslis lived in the Congo across the whole period; the wider Jewish community, including Ashkenazim and later arrivals, reached roughly 2,500 by independence in 1960, about half of them in Élisabethville. The two figures are often conflated — the 2,500 is the whole community, the 1,000–1,500 the Rhodesli core.

The community was reshaped by events elsewhere: many Eastern European Jews left in the 1930s economic crisis; German Jews came fleeing Nazism; after 1944 came Holocaust survivors from Rhodes; and after the 1956 Suez crisis, French-speaking Sephardim expelled from Egypt joined the community. The enduring core, though, was Rhodesli, and Ladino remained the community’s language — as it still is among the small community today.

How did they make a living?

Commerce, in and around the mining economy.

Élisabethville and Katanga boomed on copper — the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga — and the Rhodeslis built their livelihoods as merchants and traders, occupying an informal sector between the colonial companies and the local population, selling the textiles and goods that both settlers and Congolese needed, and running shops deep in the interior of Katanga and Kasai.

Several families built major firms. Solbena (Salomon Benatar et fils) had seventeen branches across the Congo by the 1940s and later a textile factory employing over a thousand workers. Amato Frères, founded in 1925 at Kamina, worked in import-export and in manioc, palm oil and peanuts. The Alhadeff and Tarica houses were of the same kind. Maurice Alhadeff ran a large import-export business, served as honorary consul of Israel in Léopoldville, and became a well-known patron of Congolese artists.

Where did they stand between colonizer and colonized?

In an ambiguous position that the honest record should not smooth over.

Rhodes had passed from Ottoman to Italian rule in 1912, and from 1925 its Jews could hold the cittadinanza egea, a limited Italian status. In the Congo they were often seen by the Belgians as petits-blancs, lower-status Mediterranean Europeans outside the colonial administration.

During the Italo-Ethiopian war of 1935–36 some Rhodeslis supported Italy and helped establish branches of the Fascist party — a fascio in Élisabethville and another in Jadotville (Likasi) — in line with the nationalism of Italian Jews before Fascism adopted anti-Jewish laws. Those laws came in 1938; and when the Second World War broke out, Rhodeslis holding Italian passports were interned in the Congo as enemy aliens, until Rabbi Moïse Levy — and, by another account, Gabriel Benatar — intervened with the governor of Katanga to free them.

As Jews who were colonial subjects in the Italian Dodecanese, then “enemy Italians”, then citizens of a Belgian colony, the Rhodeslis moved between national identities as circumstance demanded. And, like other settlers, they lived within and benefited from a colonial order that ruled over the Congolese — a fact their own later memoirs acknowledge only obliquely.

How did the destruction of Rhodes affect them?

It made the Congo community, in part, the reconstituted remnant of a community annihilated at its source.

In July 1944 the German occupiers, with the remaining Italian authorities, deported almost the entire Jewish community of Rhodes to Auschwitz. Of roughly 1,660 deported, fewer than two hundred survived; accounts give figures around 151 to 163. News of the deportation reached the Congo and Rhodesia within weeks.

The Congo then became a refuge for the survivors. About seventy of them — nearly half of all Rhodesli survivors, most of them women — came to the Belgian Congo, where they had living relatives able to support them, and helped seed a new generation.

What happened at independence in 1960?

The community left, suddenly, within days.

The end of Belgian rule in June 1960, the assassination of Prime Minister Lumumba and the Katanga secession from July 1960 plunged the Congo into upheaval. The community fled in convoys escorted by Belgian troops, often with only what they could carry. By July 1960 some 600 to 700 Jews, mainly women and children, had travelled to Southern Rhodesia. Some hoped to return once things calmed; almost none did.

The roughly 2,500-strong community dispersed to South Africa, Israel, Southern Rhodesia, Belgium, Italy and elsewhere. But a remnant stayed: by 2013 around 320 Jews remained, mostly in Lubumbashi, still largely Sephardi and Ladino-speaking, with a functioning synagogue and rabbi, a small Kinshasa community (the Congrégation Israélite), a Chabad presence with its Central African headquarters in Kinshasa, and community representation through the Communauté Israélite du Shaba — Shaba being the Zaire-era name for Katanga.

Why does the trail lead to Cape Town?

Because a Congo Rhodesli line very often runs directly into a living congregation there — Kahal Shalom.

Many refugees crossed first into Southern Rhodesia in 1960, and from there — a place many already knew from summer holidays — came down to Cape Town. The Cape Town Sephardi community sheltered them: some eighty refugees were given medical care, clothing, accommodation in private homes and in Highlands House and Oranjia, schooling at Herzlia, and help finding work, coordinated with the South African Jewish Board of Deputies.

Being French- and Ladino-speaking, the newcomers found the Ashkenazi minhag of the Gardens & Sea Point Hebrew Congregation unfamiliar, and from 1960 held their own High Holy Day services — led by lay leaders Joseph Rahmani and Moise Israel — in a borrowed schoolroom, worshipping the rest of the year at Marais Road. As numbers grew, the Gardens & Sea Point congregation lent them Torah scrolls, prayer books and larger halls.

In 1971, when Rhodesia’s Bush War drove the Rhodesian Sephardim out too, many came to Cape Town where their fellows already were, and the community swelled to some 180 families, around 600 people. In 1979 they were given permanent use of the Minor Weizmann Hall as a synagogue and appointed their own rabbi, Reuben Suiza. This is the origin of Kahal Shalom, the Sephardi Hebrew Congregation of Cape Town at Sea Point — named, like Rhodesli congregations in Brussels, Seattle, Harare and Ashdod, after the surviving synagogue of Rhodes.

Does the synagogue or cemetery survive?

The synagogue was consecrated in Élisabethville in 1930 and is understood to survive in Lubumbashi.

Rabbi Moïse Levy — a graduate of the Italian rabbinical college of Rhodes — led the Jewish communities of the Congo and Ruanda-Urundi from 1937 over some five decades, and is the subject of a published biography by Milantia Bourla Errera. A Jewish burial ground exists and was, into recent decades, administered under the authority of the community’s chief rabbi, latterly from Brussels.

We would like to confirm the synagogue’s present condition, and the location and state of the Élisabethville/Lubumbashi Jewish cemetery — which is the obvious primary genealogical source here — and of any burial ground in Kinshasa. If you can help, please see below.

What records can you actually reach?

The community is documented through Belgian colonial records, its own community records, the diaspora congregations, and an unusually strong recent scholarly and memorial literature. As Miccoli notes, the written records are fragmentary and multi-sited, scattered by migration and the Holocaust, so research means working across several countries and languages.

Belgian colonial records

Because the Congo was Belgian, the colonial administrative records — including civil registration of the European population, which covered the Jewish settlers — are held in Belgium, above all in the Archives Africaines (the archives of the former Ministry of Colonies and the Governor-General of the Congo) in the Belgian State Archives in Brussels, covering 1885 to 1962. These are the first port of call for colonial-period births, marriages, deaths and residence. The Congolese national archives themselves are, as Miccoli warns, difficult of access.

Community and diaspora records

The Congo community organisations — the Congrégation Israélite du Katanga from 1909, the Communauté du Congo Belge et du Ruanda-Urundi from 1911, later the Communauté Israélite du Shaba — generated their own registers, and the surviving Lubumbashi and Kinshasa communities are the natural contacts.

Because so many families went to South Africa, the records of Kahal Shalom and the Gardens & Sea Point Hebrew Congregation, and the South African Jewish archives — the Kaplan Centre at the University of Cape Town and the SA Jewish Board of Deputies — are important. So are the Zimbabwe Jewish Community records, which have published Alhadeff and Benatar family material online, and the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem, which holds the Sephardi Hebrew Congregation of Rhodesia minute-books.

Rhodesli and Sephardi networks

Since the enduring community was Rhodesli, its genealogy belongs to the wider Rhodes diaspora: the Rhodes Jewish Museum (Kahal Shalom, Rhodes) and the Rhodesli associations of southern Africa, the United States, Israel and Belgium are all relevant.

What has and hasn’t been researched

The community’s history is now well told in scholarship; the genealogical detail is still to be gathered.

We hold no primary records on this community yet. The family names, the community registers and the cemetery inscriptions are the priority — the Belgian civil registers and the Élisabethville cemetery would supply them.
The Rhodes–Egypt–Congo–southern Africa–Israel chain is the heart of the story, and the Cape Town congregation records make the Congo–South Africa link traceable family by family.
The earliest and later non-Rhodesli layers — the 1909 Ashkenazim, the Romanian and Polish families, the German refugees, and the Egyptian Sephardim of 1956 — are easily lost from the Rhodesli-focused accounts and deserve separate attention.

Organisations and repositories

Communauté Israélite de Lubumbashi and the Congrégation Israélite of Kinshasa; Chabad Central Africa, Kinshasa.

Archives Africaines, Belgian State Archives, Brussels — Belgian Congo colonial records, 1885–1962.

Kahal Shalom, Sephardi Hebrew Congregation of Cape Town (Sea Point), and the Gardens & Sea Point Hebrew Congregation.

Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Cape Town, and the South African Jewish Board of Deputies.

Zimbabwe Jewish Community, and the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem — the Sephardi Hebrew Congregation of Rhodesia records.

Rhodes Jewish Museum (Kahal Shalom), Rhodes, and the Rhodesli associations worldwide.

Help us find records

This is a community on which we are actively seeking material. We are looking for:

Photographs, transcriptions or records of the Élisabethville (Lubumbashi) synagogue and the Jewish cemetery
Registers of the Congrégation Israélite du Katanga, the Communauté du Congo Belge et du Ruanda-Urundi, and the Communauté Israélite du Shaba
Records of Kahal Shalom (Cape Town) and the Sephardi Hebrew Congregation of Rhodesia documenting the Congo families’ onward migration
Family histories of the Congo Rhodeslis — Benatar, Alhadeff, Amato, Tarica and others — and their moves to South Africa, Israel, Belgium and beyond
Belgian colonial civil-registration entries for Jewish residents of the Congo
Material on the earliest Ashkenazi and Eastern European families, the German refugees, and the Egyptian Sephardim who arrived after 1956

If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected]. Material contributed is credited, and we are happy to work under any conditions you set.

Research services

Congo Sephardi research means a small, dispersed community documented through Belgian colonial records in Brussels, the surviving community in Lubumbashi and Kinshasa, the Cape Town and Rhodesia congregation records, and a strong recent scholarly literature — with the origin on the island of Rhodes, often via Egypt, and the wider Rhodesli network behind it. It calls for work across Belgian, South African, Zimbabwean, Israeli and Rhodes sources in several languages. If you would like help, including for a Portuguese or Spanish nationality application, you can hire a professional Sephardic genealogist.

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