(JTA) — Ugandan Rabbi Gershom Sizomu said he will contest last week’s Ugandan elections, saying the vote was fixed.
Sizomu, who ran for the national parliament, finished second in the Mbale District. He told The Jerusalem Post that his supporters from the opposition Forum for Democratic Change Party were chased away from more than eight polling stations and that ballot boxes were stuffed with ballots that already had been filled out.
President Yoweri Museveni, who has been in power for 25 years, won the general election.
Sizomu, the chief rabbi of Uganda, ministers to Uganda’s native Jewish community, called the Abayudaya, 300 of whom converted to Judaism in 2003 under Sizomu’s initiative. Israel and Orthodox Jews in the Diaspora do not recognize the Abayudaya as Jewish.
Sizomu, a fourth-generation Ugandan Jew, is an ordained Conservative rabbi.
