By: Nomi Kaltmann as seen in Plus61J Media
Published: 6 September 2021
Shimon Riak and his family have just completed their conversion. He tells NOMI KALTMANN why a refugee started studying Hebrew and decided to become a Jew
SHIMON RIAK IS a religious man living a typical Jewish life in the suburbs of Melbourne. Together with his wife he attends weekly Synagogue services at Chabad of Bentleigh and keeps a strictly kosher home. Their children attend the local Hasidic schools Yeshivah College and Beth Rivkah Ladies College.
While these practices are hallmarks of an ordinary Orthodox lifestyle, Riak’s backstory is anything but ordinary: he is a survivor of the South Sudanese civil war and a former child soldier who was granted refugee status by Australia in 2004.
When the second Sudanese civil war broke out in 1983, Riak became one of what he calls one of “the lost boys of Sudan” and was recruited to be a child soldier in a messy ethnic war. A member of the Dinka people (a group native to the now newly independent South Sudan) his tribe had been singled out by the government in Khartoum in the North of Sudan who slaughtered them by the thousand.
“The Central government in the North, committed ethnic cleansing,” he says. “After leaving the village, I spent three years fleeing and running away from bombs. It was very difficult,” he told The Jewish Independent.
Escaping persecution, Riak fled to neighbouring Kenya where he was resettled in the Kakuma Refugee Camp.
In the refugee camp, Riak began to look for God. “I was hungry for meaning, I attributed my survival during the civil war in Sudan to God, it was obvious to me that the finger of God was in my life,” he says.
He had been exposed to spirituality in Sudan, “I would not describe the Dinka’s as having a religion in the modern sense; they were never Muslims nor Christians, but their practices fall under the broad category of African religious practices,” he says.
Along with his friends in the refugee camp, he discovered a diverse group of Kenyans who practiced a hybrid form of Christianity, which incorporated some Jewish practices like celebrating Passover and Succot. “When I found this group of Kenyans, it was an amazing spiritual experience,” according to Riak.
After spending years in Kenya, where he found out that his brother and some of his relatives had been murdered in the Sudanese civil war, he was accepted into Australia as a refugee and landed in Adelaide, in 2004. He has not been back to his homeland since arriving here (although he briefly returned there in 2003 while he was still in Kenya).
“When I came to Australia, I saw that it was a very beautiful country: it had nice buildings and was very orderly. However, I became very confused, because spiritually it was a bit of a desert, so I began searching for meaning,” he says.
After returning briefly to Kenya to marry his wife Hana (who he had met while living there) and they both settled in Adelaide to restart their lives.
However, Riak was itching for more. In 2006 he remembers searching for answers. “I had been reading the Bible in English. I thought to myself: I can’t learn Bible in English, I need to learn Hebrew, I need to learn the language of the prophets.”
A quick Google search revealed an English transliterated version of the Hebrew Shema prayer. “My middle name in Dinka language is “Chol” which means ‘black’ ‘or ‘gift, and as I was looking at a transliterated version of the prayer, the Hebrew word, “bechol” jumped out at me from the text of the Shema prayer,” he says. “At the time I didn’t know what this Hebrew word meant, but I knew that this text knew my name and I had to know more.”
From Adelaide, Riak enrolled in an online Hebrew course from Israel and notes that he keenly absorbed everything his online teacher in Ramat Gan taught. “He taught me Aleph one day, I knew Bet by the next day,” he says.
His journey to Judaism was just beginning.
“In 2009, a few years after I arrived in Australia, I went to a Chanukah party in Victoria Square in Adelaide run by Rabbi Yossi Engel; at the party people were really nice, a few asked me if I am from Ethiopia [as there is a large Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel]; I said no, that I was from Sudan and that my wife was Kenyan; it was a bit confusing for them to see how it all fit together,” he says.
Following this event, Rabbi Engel invited Riak to his house to talk. “We spoke for about two and a half hours and Rabbi Engel told me: ‘you are very hungry for Jewish knowledge: you need to find a synagogue,” says Riak. So, after their meeting, he started going regularly to the Adelaide Hebrew Congregation.
In 2015, Riak, his wife Hannah and children decided to move to Melbourne, where both Riak and his wife now work as nurses.
“I had this nagging feeling that after all these years of studying Hebrew and going to synagogue I had to apply to convert to become Jewish,” he remarks. “Many people have asked me: why you? Why Judaism? It’s not something I can explain, it’s a deeper feeling.”
Riak wrote a letter to the Melbourne Beth Din in December 2018, and they accepted him and his family as conversion candidates. Since then, they have been studying the material required to finish all their tests.
As of this month, the family have completed all their conversion modules and have passed all tests required for conversion.
“Due to lockdown in Victoria, the Beth Din is not open at the moment, but thank God, we have finished all the modules, and we are just waiting for them to give us a final conversion date,” he says.
Today Riak is fluent in Hebrew, and he credits his quick learning of the language to his previous exposure to Arabic in Sudan and later Swahili in Kenya. His wife Hana is still progressing her Hebrew language skills, and according to Riak their kids, “are like sponges, they have absorbed everything in a short amount of time and are able to keep up really well at their Jewish schools.”
When asked if he or his family have experienced any racism within the Melbourne Jewish Community, Riak answered pragmatically. “When I look at Judaism: there is no concept of black, yellow or white relating to people’s skin,” he says.
“Jewish people know that all people are created in the original image of Hashem, and while in some cases, racism may happen, I would see such behaviour as a human error, not from Judaism.”
He related a recent story that happened when Hana took their young son to an office with mainly African staff in the Melbourne CBD. “My little boy Yonah, he saw that all the people in the office were black, so he said: ‘how come everyone is black?!’
“It’s funny, because he doesn’t realise that he himself is black, so really, I think that it’s how we educate ourselves and others, that is the most important thing.”