How the British offered to settle Jews in Rift Valley

But the Russian Jews opposed the plan, wanting nothing short of the Promised Land for the children of Israel.

By JOSEPH KABIA

Posted Wednesday, May 5 2010 at 21:17

The British and the then colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain set out to lure the Jews out of their homeland dream and resettle them in Kenya through the Nairobi Plan of 1902.

Out of persecution and desperation in Europe, Theodore Herzel, the father of the Zionist movement born in the 19th century to unite Jews in exile accepted the plan.

But the Russian Jews opposed the plan, wanting nothing short of the Promised Land for the children of Israel.

Other groups like the Israel Zangwill continued to pursue the Nairobi Plan after the 7th Zionist congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1905, where the Jews formally rejected the British offer.

The Nairobi Plan, heralded as the New Judea, New Palestine, New Sinai, or British Palestine, then coded Operation Samson, was equal to 7,984 square kilometres of land demarcated in Uasin Gishu District.

Had the Nairobi Plan succeeded, the Holocaust might not have happened in the scale it did because most vulnerable Jews would have been safely in Kenya, not in Hitler’s German lap.

Andrew Nugget Dugger, an American Jew born in 1889 in Nebraska, migrated to Israel in 1952. In mid 1960s, he found several men in Kenya he taught that there was only one God, supreme and eternal known as Elohim in Hebrew.

He taught them to serve Elohim by prayers, study and observing the holy commandments as set forth in the Torah. He taught them about Jewish holy feasts like the Pesach, Shavuot, Yom Kippur, Succoth and Hannukah.

In 1970, A. N. Dugger sent compatriot and German-born Andy Shoemaker to perform ceremonies and to receive the 300 converts into the family of Messianic Jews.

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