Today, only about a dozen Jews, mostly from Israel, live in Cameroon. The Israeli Embassy is located in the capital of Cameroon, Yaoundé. Services for holidays are held in the house of the Israeli ambassador, in which Jews can also find a kosher meal.

There are some who believe that an ancient Jewish presence once existed in Cameroon via merchants who arrived from Egypt for trade. These early communities in Cameroon observed rituals such as separation of dairy and meat products, as well as wearing tefillin.

There are also claims that Jews migrated into Cameroon much later, after being forced southward due to the Islamic conquests of North Africa.

Rabbi Yisrael Oriel, formerly Bodol Ngimbus-Ngimbus, was born into the Ba-Saa tribe. The word Ba-Saa, he said, is from the Hebrew for ‘on a journey’ and means blessing.

He claims to be a Levite descended from Moses. He said that in 1920 there were 400,000 ‘Israelites’ in Cameroon, but that these tribes had not been accepted halachically.

There are also 1,000 Evangelical Christians in Cameroon decided they no longer wanted to practice Christianity and turned instead to Judaism, embracing practices from the bible. Their informal conversion to Judaism is similar to Uganda’s Abuyadaya Jewish community which, in 1919, also moved towards Judaism even though, in both cases, they had never met any Jews and had no in-person guidance or mentoring in developing their Jewish identity. The Cameroon community calls itself Beth Yeshourun and is very small, with only 60 members in total.

Much of what the community has learned has been via the Internet, including downloading prayers and songs. Some of the community has taught itself Hebrew; others pray in a mixture of French and transliterated Hebrew.