The Jewish Diaspora in South Africa

THE STORY OF THE JEWISH DIASPORA IN SOUTH AFRICA

As Shea Albert, Director of the South African Museum stated to me yesterday, the South African Jewish Museum is, at its heart, a museum of migration to which anyone who has ever thought of seeking a better life elsewhere can relate. Indeed, this superb museum of immigration very much reminds me of institutions of historical memory, in New York City, such as the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and/or Ellis Island as all of these centers highlight the precedents and patterns of global migration. Just as Greeks, Italians, Poles, Irish, Chinese, Germans, and many others, have been drawn to live their lives in economically prosperous nations such as Canada, the United States, Australia, and/or New Zealand, Jews, largely from a Central and Eastern European Ashkenazi background, were drawn to South Africa for the opportunities for a better life that it presented during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

While there were a few Jews on record as being present in the Cape Colony during the period of Dutch rule, given the Dutch government’s ban on any religion other than Dutch Reformist, these Jewish immigrants soon became religious converts to Christianity. Other European Jews were therefore not enticed to journey to the colony. This changed after the takeover of the colony by the British, during the 1700s, which saw an increase in the number of British and German Jews entering what would one day become the Republic of South Africa.

The South African Jewish Museum is, in fact, housed around the oldest Synagogue in the country which was built in 1863. The synagogue was constructed around the Company Gardens, which acts very much like the village green in Cape Town, and this suggests that the Jewish community was accepted culturally from the start of its growth. According to Ms. Albert, in South Africa, intolerance has been largely centered on race rather than religion and, indeed, Cape Town would see its first Jewish mayor, Lieberman, as early as 1904, and South Africa, by the late 1890s, would witness a growing number of Jewish prospectors selling provisions in-country to those panning for diamonds and gold in places such as Kimberley and the area around what would become Johannesburg. Soon, some of these prospectors would invest in mines themselves. Barney Barnato and Sammy Marks, for instance, both Jewish immigrants, would sit alongside that of Cecil John Rhodes as the country’s first “randlords”.

As the 1800s progressed, South Africa saw the largest number of Jews coming from Lithuania and/or Latvia as religious pogroms against Jews in this part of the former Russian Empire were both bloody and widespread. The parents of famed South African Novelist Nadine Gordimer, for instance, came from Lithuania. Usually, would-be Lithuanian immigrants would travel to England and stay at the Jewish Temporary Shelter in London. As passage from England to South Africa was cheaper than that to the United States, some Jewish people took this option. Others, only knowing Yiddish, came by mistake thinking that they had reached America. There is an exhibit in the museum honoring both Sammy Marks, for financially sponsoring the emigration of Lithuanian Jews willing to do manual labor, as well as those individuals who returned to Lithuania/Russia to escort Jewish children, orphaned by the pogroms, to South Africa. Also of interest is the recreation of the Lithuanian village lived in by the Israeli architect’s grandfather.

The vast majority of the Jewish community, like that of other whites, is solidly lower to upper middle class. At its height, the community only numbered around 120,000 and, today, numbers even less at around 80,000. As like other South Africans of means, the rest have migrated during/after Apartheid for career opportunities abroad. There is also a rather small Holocaust survivors group; the members of which started arriving in South Africa largely from the 1950s to 1970s. Most Jewish South Africans, however, have no direct connection to the Holocaust as Jewish immigration to South Africa was an earlier phenomena and halted during the Second World War. In most cases, not being cognizant of South Africa’s racial tensions, Holocaust survivors, like those elsewhere, often came to South Africa because of family connections.

The museum honors those that stood up to the oppression of Apartheid. While, as a group, South African Jews were not unified against Apartheid, of those whites who signed the Freedom Charter, in the 1950s, and who were later tried on charges of treason, ironically in the main synagogue of Pretoria, half in the first trial and most during the second trial were Jewish. (Both the prosecuting and defending lawyers were also Jewish.) Among this group of those tried include activists Joe Slovo and his first wife Ruth First who was later be assassinated by the secret police force of Apartheid era South Africa. There is also a movie frequently shown called “Mandela and the Jews of South Africa” which profiles Mandela’s connections with prominent Jews both in/out of the African National Congress during the time of Apartheid. The movie looks at the role, for instance, played by Helen Susman, who is the longest serving member in South Africa’s parliament, in the struggle to end Apartheid, and her friendship with Mandela. Mandela officially opened the South African Jewish Museum in 2000.

THE HOLOCAUST CENTRE OF CAPE TOWN

Before visiting the South African Jewish Museum, I was fortunate to have met with Education Director Marlene Silbert. Herself a former vice-principal and anti-Apartheid activist, having even going as far as to hide people from the South African police, Ms. Silbert has made a conscious effort to integrate the history of the Holocaust with that of Apartheid as a means by which to look at the Holocaust and Apartheid as human rights travesties that have relevance and meaning for all people regardless of their ethnic, national, and/or religious backgrounds. If, as the human race, we are ever to live peacefully with one another, our students must learn to look at these evil transgressions of human rights in a global sense.

While the Holocaust and Apartheid are not completely analogous, the Nationalist Party in South Africa, which was largely of conservative Afrikaner base, did support Germany in many matters. This group had not forgotten its prior difficulties with the British, and the two Anglo-Boer Wars (1700s/1899), and, as such, looked at Germany with sympathy as tensions between it and Great Britain intensified during the 1930s.

Indeed, it was this ultra-right wing group of South African Nazi sympathizers, the Grey Shirts, who pressured the South African government to limit Jewish immigration to South Africa as the 30s progressed. For example, as with the refugee ship the St. Louis, and the refusal of the US government to let it dock, so too was “The Stuttgart” denied entry into South Africa. Curiously, however, the South African government, in agreement with the Free Polish government in exile in London, the Soviet Union (occupying one part of Poland -as was Germany), and Great Britain, allowed 500 Polish children from Soviet-occupied Poland to come to South Africa as part of a small “kinder (Children’s) transport” like the much larger one implemented in Britain. These children, a mixture of both Christians and Jews, were housed in the Polish Orphans Home in Oudtshoorn, South Africa which was known as “Little Jerusalem” and/or “Jerusalem in Africa” for its large Jewish community prior to the war. Many of these children later settled in South Africa.

Nonetheless, in 1948, the Nationalists came to power in South Africa, under President Verwoerd, and Apartheid legislation was enacted that was similar to the discriminative Nuremberg laws that had been instituted against European Jews, by the Nazis, during the Holocaust. Race (and the false belief that race denoted intelligence) theory, a pseudo-science also called Eugenics and developed in the United States and Germany at the turn of the 20^th century, was also embraced by the Nationalist Party in its bid to separate white, colored, and black South Africans into a definitive pecking order.

The museum contains photographs and letters sent from desperate relatives to loved ones lucky to have immigrated to South Africa before Nazi domination of Europe. It also contains the I.D. photographs of Jews from the town of Bedzin, Poland, who had been deported to the death camps. On a touching but sad note, a visiting survivor, now living in Johannesburg, saw the identification photographs of his family in this collection, for the first time in 60 years, as these were the only photos having ever been taken of his family. As stated in a previous post, survivors ended up in South Africa because, after the war, often having no immediate family left alive in Europe, they were sponsored by relatives in Africa. Ms. Silbert’s parents, for example, sponsored a few distant cousins, lucky enough to survive, through the South African citizenship process. Others, having been taken in as children by Britain, during the war, came to South Africa as working adults and through the country’s ties with Britain as a British colony. Still other survivors came simply because someone with whom they had talked had said that South Africa was a land of opportunity. Having a Greek population in place prior to the war, there are also a number of Holocaust survivors, in South Africa, originally from Rhodes Island. Some survivors temporarily relocated to the Belgian Congo (Zaire), Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), etc. only to move again to South Africa during the independence struggles in these other countries.

The museum does not just focus on the past as a form of memorial only. By using artifacts of both concentration camps as well as mine worker hostels in South Africa during Apartheid, and through diversity instruction, the Centre instructs the new South African Police Forces. There have been some positive changes in juvenile facilities because of this program. The Centre also works with soon to be released prison inmates by focusing on both the feelings of victims as well as stories of survival and rebirth. Children also remain a focus of the Centre.