(Author: Zita Nurok, Vol. 78, #3, Spring-Summer 2023) The year is 1948. In our small town of Roodepoort a powerful weather event is about to be unleashed. My mother, elder brother and I see ominous signs in the sky one November
(Author: Shirley Zar, Vol. 78, #2, Winter 2023) Recently, I read the book Kabbalah in Art and Architecture by Alexander Gorlin, which opened my eyes to my understanding of a building with which I as an architect am familiar, but which remains an
(Author: Gwynne Schrire, Vol 78, #2, Winter 2023) Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time. With these words Henry Longfellow, the American poet who
(Author: Zita Nurok, Vol. 77 2, Autumn 2022) At the beginning of the Twentieth Century, four brothers and a sister emigrated from Kurshan, Lithuania, to South Africa. Many are the reasons why people leave the country of their birth. Those four brothers and
(Author: Gwynne Schrire, Vol. 76, #3, Spring 2021) In February 1966, the apartheid government announced that it was going to apply the Group Areas Act to District Six, a suburb with a long history of mixed race residence. Esther Wilkin who grew up
(Author: Zita Nurok, Vol. 76 * No. 3 * Spring 2021) Roodepoort’s small shul building was the place that held our community of approximately sixty Jewish families together. There were families that originated in Eastern Europe, from places such as Lithuania and Poland and
(Author: Glenda Woolf, Vol. 73, No. 2, Rosh Hashanah 2018) I remember well that first Yom Ha’atzmaut celebration in Bloemfontein. The most lasting memory I have is the prediction my mother made about the future. Other memories too, come flooding back. So, to
(Author: Mary Kropman, Vol. 64, #1, Pesach 2009) Feature image: The old King Williams Town synagogue After his barmitzvah, my Father worked in my Zeida’s trading store in Ngwenya, Eastern Cape. He mastered the Xhosa language and would converse with the customers about their
(Author: Bernard Duchen, Vol. 65, No. 3, Chanukah 2010) I was born in Johannesburg, in December 1941, but grew up in Wesselsnek, a little coal mining village in the district of Kliprivier, in the Dundee/Newcastle/Ladysmith triangle of Northern Natal. From around 1840, this had become
(Author: Naomi Musiker, Vol. 65, No. 3, Chanukah 2010) Feature image: Laying of the foundation stone of the Fordsburg synagogue, 1904, by Mrs L R Melman on behalf of the Fordsburg & Districts Benevolent Society. With her is her husband, Mr Melman. Most of