George Tripper, one of the elders of the Jewish community in Namibia and who served as the Hungarian ambassador in Namibia, passed away yesterday at the age of 80. George was born in Hungary a few months after the Holocaust, but due to hardships at that time, he did not grow up as a Jew. In recent years, he discovered his Jewish roots through the activities of Chabad in Namibia and the local emissary, Rabbi Yosef Rahimi, who visited him almost every week and helped him put on Tefillin (phylacteries). George used his position as the Hungarian ambassador in Namibia to help obtain permission to import the Four Species (religious items used during the Jewish holiday of Tabernacles) into the country. After he passed away Rabbi Rahimi enlisted the help of local residents to arrange a Jewish burial. "Thank God he was privileged to be buried as a Jew and we even had a minyan (a quorum of ten men) for the Kaddish prayer (said for the dead), thanks to the efforts of the Jewish community members R' Tzvi and Nachum Gorelik. It's never too late to awaken a Jewish spark," he said.
