(Author: Zita Nurok, Vol. 80, #1, Autumn 2025) The willow tree at the bottom of our backyard garden was the gift that nature gave me as a Jewish child growing up in small-town South Africa. It offered me the riches of my
(Author: Wilf Stein, Vol. 80, #1, Autumn 2025) The town of Sutherland lies in South Africa’s Northern Cape province. It has the reputation of being the coldest town in South Africa. As a descendant of a Sutherland family once wrote, “the water freezes
(Author: Charlotte Cohen, Vol. 80, #1, Autumn, 2025) Molly Cohen passed away just 9 days short of her 100th birthday which would have been on 18 November 2013. Prior to her death, she was the last surviving Ochberg Orphan in Cape Town. ‘Connections and
[Reviewer: David Saks, Vol 79, #2, Summer 2024) I may be sticking my neck out here, but it may well be that no other Jewish community anywhere has gone about recording its own history with as much avidity as that of South Africa’s. It
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
(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,
(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: 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
(Author: Steve Katzew, Vol. 79, #1, Winter 2024) I’ve always maintained that humankind is at its best in partnerships across lines of differences in race, religion, and nationality. The Jewish experience in South Africa bears this out. The giddying heights reached by disparate