In the summer of 2001, Harriet Bograd  visited her daughter Margie, who had taken a summer job in a remote village in Ghana. When Ms. Bograd and her husband, Ken Klein, arrived in the village, Sefwi Wiawso, they learned about its community of two dozen families who considered themselves Jewish. In the week she was there, Ms. Bograd turned her enchantment with the villagers into a practical project that has become a major source of income for the community. She guided artisans in fashioning the colorful kente cloth sold in the local market into challah covers. A trained lawyer, she set up the community as an incorporated business that sold the challah covers across the United States for $36 each. Thousands have been purchased.

In the years after that trip, Ms. Bograd worked with the nonprofit organization Kulanu, which supports “isolated, emerging or returning” Jewish communities in places where even most American Jews don’t realize there are Jews: Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Cameroon, Madagascar, Indonesia, Pakistan, Guatemala, the Philippines and more — 33 countries in total.

“It gave her joy that these people felt they were connected to the greater Jewish world and felt they belonged,” said Mollie Levine, deputy director of Kulanu, whose Hebrew name means “all of us.”

Harriet Bograd died Sept. 17 in a Manhattan hospital, following complications of heart surgery.