This is The Guardian.

Red by Raj Ghatak, produced by Jessica Beck.

The executive producer was Max Sanderson.

Back in the 1970s, when Moshe Ben Avram was growing up in Port Harcourt in southern Nigeria,

the town was small and fringed by bush villages and there were no Jews in sight.

Ben Avram wasn't yet Jewish himself. He wasn't even Ben Avram for that matter.

His Anglican parents gave him the name Moses Wallaceon, still his official name,

and they raised him as a church-going boy.

In this, they were no different from millions of others in their part of the country.

One of the first demographic details anyone learns about Nigeria is that while people living up north are predominantly Muslim,

those down south are just as overwhelmingly Christian.

The minibus is sputtering up and down these southern highways, their slogans like Jesus is needful on their back windows.

On billboards, preachers hype their ministries. A prayer meeting is never just a prayer meeting.

It is a global mega-power quake or a harvest of miracles.

Islam and Christianity have been in Nigeria for centuries, but Judaism has none of that conspicuous history or heritage.

In his childhood, Ben Avram knew nothing about Judaism, and he'd only encountered Israel as a biblical name.

Israel, Abraham, all those things he recalled.

Then, in 1986, his father died, and a few years later, in the midst of a growing disaffection with his church,

Ben Avram fell ill, a cut on his tongue that set off a severe infection.

At the time, he came across a Christian ministry called the White Garment Sabbath, and after one of its white-robed, bare-footed priests healed him, he joined the group.

In Nigeria, the White Garment Sabbath calls itself a church, and its prayer halls host icons of Christ on the cross.

But they told me that Saturday is the day of worship, the Shabbat, not Sunday, Ben Avram said.

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