In a remote area of Kenya, a small community of Jews has recently established contact with other East African Jews. Although their origins are uncertain, they seem to have come to Judaism through Christianity in the 1990s, and were formally converted under the auspices of the American Conservative movement in 2006. Melanie Lidman writes:

The 60 members of the Kasuku Gathundia Jewish community are sprinkled across the Kenyan highlands, eking out a living as subsistence farmers during the week by raising cows and maize. On Saturday mornings they unwrap an old United Synagogue ḥumash—a bound copy of the Torah (not a scroll)—from a canvas bag and read the weekly Torah portion, partly in Hebrew and partly in the local Kikuya tribal language. . . .

Yosef ben Avraham Njogu, the community’s patriarch, . . . explained that Kasuku also happens to be the headquarters of Kenya’s sizable Messianic Jewish congregation. In the late 1990s, some Messianic Jews decided that it was time to fulfill the prophecy and move to Israel. So the leaders of the Messianic church reached out to the Israeli embassy in Nairobi, inquiring about the process of moving to the Holy Land. . . .

“We started to understand there’s a difference between Messianic Judaism and Judaism, and some of us chose to turn to Judaism,” said Njogu, sitting in his living room, [which is] adorned with an Israeli flag and a poster of the Hebrew alphabet.

But most of the Messianic church did not agree. So, Njogu and another church elder, Avraham Ndungu Mbugua, broke away and started studying Judaism in depth, keeping the Sabbath and other holidays based on books about Judaism they photocopied from the library.

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.