On 11 November, the South African Jewish Board of Deputies belatedly celebrated its 120th anniversary with a special gala dinner at the Wanderers Club in Sandton. More than 300 people attended the event, among them ministers; deputy ministers; the heads of parliamentary portfolio committees; representatives
……………………………………………… ………………………………. ………………………………….. No, Yitz Yitz, Wouldn’t it be lovely if Zelig and you soaked in soup super glue And rebounded the shape of this awful filth hate For this man howls like a cow, in the darkest loose sky And mopes at
(Author: David Saks, Vol. 79, #2, Summer, 2024) As the truism goes, South African Jewry is a primarily a community of Lithuanian origin, and while it inevitably needs much qualifying, that is substantially true. During the half century roughly commencing in the early 1880s,
EDITOR’S NOTE: To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps, in 1995 the Cape Town Holocaust Memorial Council published In Sacred Memory: Recollections of the Holocaust by survivors living in Cape Town. The book, which has been reprinted twice,
(Author: Miriam Herzfeld, Vol. 79, #2, Summer, 2024) Bochum is a coal mining town in Western Germany. Jews had lived in Bochum since 1349, and there were 1152 Jews there in 1933. They included my parents, Moritz and Anna Samson, my brother Klaus, who
(Author: Rasa Jankauskaite, Vol. 79, #2, Summer 2024) Every year we in Lithuania commemorate an important and painful anniversary – ZYDU GENOCIDO DIENA, REMEMBRANCE DAY OF THE LITHUANIAN JEWISH GENOCIDE. This is the day on which, on 23 September 1943, the Vilnius ghetto was liquidated.
(Author: Zita Nurok, Vol. 79, #2, Summer 2024) The small building before me had become a panel-beating business. But the tell-tale symbol on its roof brought me back to my childhood days, and my growing-up years in the town. The Magen David on the
(Author: Gwynne Schrire, Vol. 79, #2, Summer 2024) A picture of a metal box had been sent for identification to Cape Town Holocaust Centre director Richard Freedman. What was it? Prof Arie Alexander Galles and his wife Sara were to be guests of
(Author: Emma Wilkins, Volume 79, #2, Summer 2024) Oral history is unique in its ability to individualise and emotionalise the experiences of Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs). Within the unlikely space of occupied Germany, the surviving Jewish population began the process of reclaiming its
(Author: Gwynne Schrire, Vol. 79, #2, Summer 2024) Most people associate the South African Jewish Board of Deputies with tackling antisemitism and taking on the Government when its irrational pro-Hamas and pro-Palestine platform interferes with the Constitutional right of the Jewish community